Fake Washington, Fake Jefferson, Fake Henry

Many posts have discussed fake quotations from Lincoln, Jefferson, Tocqueville, and others.

John Fea at Current:

 Here is Kyle Mantyla at Right Wing Watch:

MAGA pastor and self-proclaimed “prophet” Hank Kunneman held a special patriotic church service prior to Independence Day earlier this month, during which he read made-up a quote supposedly from Thomas Jefferson in an attempt to argue that America was founded as and must remain a Christian nation.

During the service, Kunneman flagrantly misrepresented the famous 1802 “separation of church and state” letter that Jefferson sent to the Danbury Baptists after being elected president.

After mistakenly claiming that this quote came from “an address” that Jefferson delivered to the Danbury Baptists, Kunneman then read a laughably false quote supposedly delivered by Jefferson.

“He said, ‘The First Amendment has created a wall of separation between church and state,’” Kunneman declared, while an image of false quote was projected on screen. “‘But that wall is one directional. It keeps the government from running the church, and it makes sure that Christian principles will always stay in government.’”

“Take that and choke,” Kunneman smugly proclaimed.

Read the rest here.

Watch the entire sermon here.

Some of you might notice that Kunneman also throws up on the screen a quote that he claims comes from George Washington’s Farewell Address: “Do not let anyone claim tribute of American patriotism, if they even attempt to remove religion from politics.” Read the farewell address here. Kunneman only got this quote half right. (The words after the comma are not Washington’s). Apparently Kunneman got this quote off the internet. He didn’t even bother to read the original document.

And that’s not all. Kunneman follows this up with the fake Patrick Henry quote that got Missouri senator Josh Hawley into trouble earlier this month.

Constitutional Obligation

Many posts have discussed the Founding.

Greg Weiner at The Constitutionalist:

When teaching Edmund Burke, I often pose this question: Suppose you inherit a manor house that has been in your family for generations. It has, in all likelihood, been modified, whether with electricity or indoor plumbing or a modern kitchen. But the basic structure of the house remains intact: An ancestor from generations ago would still recognize it. The place doesn’t suit your tastes, so you decide to tear it down and build something in the style of modernist architecture instead. The question is this: Have you done something unwise or immoral?

The politics of obligation holds that you have wronged both your ancestors and descendants. Your ancestors built and tended this house; your descendants will expect to have received it in trust as well. But you elevated your appetites over that obligation.

Constitutional obligation is similar. We are obligated to the Constitution not because it or its framers were perfect—neither it nor they were—but rather because we hold their legacy in trust.

In September 1789, Madison’s friend Thomas Jefferson, the American minister to France—who was infatuated with the revolution in that country—wrote him a letter. Its central claim was that “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.” Past generations could claim no right over it. Jefferson, using demographic tables to calculate the length of a typical generation at 19 years, said no public debt or law could bind beyond that duration.

Jefferson, 1619, and 1776

So does America's origin story lie in 1619 (the arrival of slavery) or 1776 (the Declaration)? At RealClear Public Affairs, S. Adam Seagrave argues for the latter:

We know that Jefferson lived far downstream of 1619. His livelihood and self-image depended squarely on his status as a slaveholder. In his well-known 1820 letter to John Holmes, Jefferson almost makes Silverstein’s either/or argument for him, saying about the predicament of Southern slaveholders such as himself: “Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” Though many of us would like to think that 1776 weighs on the justice side of this scale, it is not clear whether Jefferson would agree. According to the author of the Declaration, 1776’s promise of “self-government and happiness” for himself and those like him was under threat during the Missouri crisis by devotees of the “abstract principle” dictating the geographic restriction of slavery.

..
Contrary to Jefferson’s proud claim on his tombstone, there were many joint authors of the Declaration of Independence. It was adopted (after alteration) by the entire Continental Congress and largely expressed what Thomas Paine had called the American “common sense” and what Jefferson would later call “the American mind.” The more one reads of the public documents, pamphlets, sermons, and letters of the decades preceding and the years immediately following the Declaration of Independence, the more one realizes that Jefferson was really more stenographer than author. Jefferson was an original thinker, but the later accusation that he had plagiarized the Declaration contained more than a grain of truth.

The candidacy of 1776 as a meaningful and valuable constituent of American identity cannot, then, be buried along with Jefferson himself. The ideas of 1776 that were expressed in the Declaration—natural human rights, limited government by consent, the right of revolution—were shared equally by Jefferson and countless other individuals at his time, many of whom were not as clearly implicated by association with the evils really and symbolically unleashed in 1619. These ideas are something apart from any of the individuals at the time who espoused them.

Slavery and the Founding

Michael Gerson at WP:

One thing we cannot do is excuse the Founders according to the standards of their time. In the mid to late 18th century, there was plenty of compelling moral thinking on the issue of slavery.

In 1759, Quaker Anthony Benezet wrote “Observations on the Enslaving, Importing and Purchasing of Negroes,” which presented eyewitness accounts of the cruelties of the slave trade. Benezet called slavery “inconsistent with the gospel of Christ, contrary to natural justice and the common feelings of humanity, and productive of infinite calamities to many thousand families, nay to many nations, and consequently offensive to God the father of all mankind.”

... 

America’s Founders stand accused by the best, most humane standards of their own time. When Jefferson wrote about natural rights on his mountaintop prison for black people, many of his contemporaries knew he was, on this issue, a total hypocrite.

America’s story is not one of initial purity and eventual decay. It is the story of a radical principle — the principle of human equality — introduced into a deeply unjust society. That principle was carried forward by oppressed people who understood it better than many of the nation’s Founders. Denied the blessings of liberty, African Americans became the instruments by which the promise of liberty was broadly achieved. The victims of America’s moral blindness became carriers of the American ideal.

This story is not simple to tell. But it is miraculous in its own way. And it is good reason to be proud of America.

Jefferson, Adams, Citizenship, Friendship

Alexander Khan at National Review:

Citizenship in America is in a troubling state. In 2015, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni conducted a survey of college graduates which found that only 28.4 percent could name James Madison as the father of the Constitution. Thirty-nine percent did not know that Congress had the war power, and roughly 45 percent did not know the length of congressional terms. In 2017, the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that 37 percent of Americans could not name any of the rights in the First Amendment, and that only 26 percent could name all three branches of government. Gallup poll results from 2018 reveal that young Americans’ views of capitalism and socialism have switched since 2010, with only 45 percent of respondents now professing a positive view of the capitalist system. A November 2018 YouGov poll revealed that Americans’ patriotism and knowledge of civics was troublingly low. More recently, in January 2019, Gallup released survey results which showed that 30 percent of younger Americans, a record high, would like to permanently leave the U.S. Unfortunately, these results are not shocking. Each new poll extends the long line of depressing findings.

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 While liberal education will never be a cure-all for the disgraceful state of civic life and historical knowledge in America, its renewal in a spirit of friendship is essential if we seek to tackle our citizenship deficit. Students educated in such an environment will not only deeply understand the ideas and principles of the Founders and of Americans throughout history, but they will also come to understand their own connection to those ideas. They will feel invested in the future of their country and in the principles that form its foundation. This educational environment will also affect the concern and interest students have in what government does, how it acts, and the way in which they see their rights and duties. Robust engagement in the classroom naturally translates to the open marketplace of ideas and the active world of citizenship. These students will serve as examples to their fellow citizens, expanding the education of the classroom to the entire country. In the fight to restore civic life and knowledge in America, the rebuilding of liberal education in the spirit of Jefferson and Adams’s friendship is an essential component.

Bush on National Identity

From remarks by President George W. Bush on October 19, 2017 at the "Spirit of Liberty: At Home, in the World," the Bush Institute’s national forum on freedom, free markets, and security. From Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, New York.

The American dream of upward mobility seems out of reach for some who feel left behind in a changing economy. Discontent deepened and sharpened partisan conflicts. Bigotry seems emboldened. Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication.

There are some signs that the intensity of support for democracy itself has waned, especially among the young, who never experienced the galvanizing moral clarity of the Cold War, or never focused on the ruin of entire nations by socialist central planning. Some have called this “democratic deconsolidation.” Really, it seems to be a combination of weariness, frayed tempers, and forgetfulness.

We have seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty. At times, it can seem like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together. Argument turns too easily into animosity. Disagreement escalates into dehumanization. Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions – forgetting the image of God we should see in each other.

We’ve seen nationalism distorted into nativism – forgotten the dynamism that immigration has always brought to America. We see a fading confidence in the value of free markets and international trade – forgetting that conflict, instability, and poverty follow in the wake of protectionism.

We have seen the return of isolationist sentiments – forgetting that American security is directly threatened by the chaos and despair of distant places, where threats such as terrorism, infectious disease, criminal gangs and drug trafficking tend to emerge.
In all these ways, we need to recall and recover our own identity. Americans have a great advantage: To renew our country, we only need to remember our values.
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Our identity as a nation – unlike many other nations – is not determined by geography or ethnicity, by soil or blood. Being an American involves the embrace of high ideals and civic responsibility. We become the heirs of Thomas Jefferson by accepting the ideal of human dignity found in the Declaration of Independence. We become the heirs of James Madison by understanding the genius and values of the U.S. Constitution. We become the heirs of Martin Luther King, Jr., by recognizing one another not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

This means that people of every race, religion, and ethnicity can be fully and equally American. It means that bigotry or white supremacy in any form is blasphemy against the American creed.

Inequality Was the Cornerstone of the Confederacy

On March 21, 1861, Alexander H. Stephens frankly explained the basis of the  Confederacy, of which he was vice president. 

The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

Hamilton!

Intro course in American politics

How most of us have seen Alexander Hamilton:

 

Ron Chernow's biography gives us a different picture of Hamilton. Here is a passage summing up what the born-out-of-wedlock Hamilton and his brother faced in their youth:

Let us pause briefly to tally the grim catalog of disasters that had befallen these two boys between 1765 and 1769: their father had vanished, their mother had died, their cousin and supposed protector had committed bloody suicide, and their aunt, uncle, and grandmother had all died. James, 16, and Alexander, 14, were now left alone, largely friendless and penniless. At every step in their rootless, topsy-turvy existence, they had been surrounded by failed, broken, embittered people. Their short lives had been shadowed by a stupefying sequence of bankruptcies, marital separations, deaths, scandals, and disinheritance. Such repeated shocks must have stripped Alexander Hamilton of any sense that life was fair, that he existed in a benign universe, or that he could ever count on help from anyone. That this abominable childhood produced such a strong, productive, self-reliant human being -- that this fatherless adolescent could have ended up a founding father of a country he had not yet even seen -- seems little short of miraculous.

Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 1: "A dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants."

Hamlton, Federalist 8: The weaker States or confederacies would first have recourse to them, to put themselves upon an equality with their more potent neighbors. They would endeavor to supply the inferiority of population and resources by a more regular and effective system of defense, by disciplined troops, and by fortifications. They would, at the same time, be necessitated to strengthen the executive arm of government, in doing which their constitutions would acquire a progressive direction toward monarchy. It is of the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of the legislative authority.

Or to put it into language with which you are more familiar:




Washington's Farewell Address



Hamilton's letter on Jefferson and Burr

Trump=Burr

When the presidential election of 1800 went to the House, Alexander Hamilton supported his old enemy Thomas Jefferson over Aaron Burr.  His description of Burr applies to Donald Trump:

Mr. Jefferson, though too revolutionary in his notions, is yet a lover of liberty and will be desirous of something like orderly Government – Mr. Burr loves nothing but himself – thinks of nothing but his own aggrandizement – and will be content with nothing short of permanent power in his own hands – No compact, that he should make with any  passion in his breast except Ambition, could be relied upon by himself – How then should we be able to rely upon any agreement with him? Mr. Jefferson, I suspect will not dare much Mr. Burr will  dare every thing in the sanguine hope of effecting every thing –]

Rand Paul's Fake Quotations

Many posts have discussed fake quotations. At Buzzfeed, Andrew Kaczynski and Megan Apper write an open letter to Senator Rand Paul about his use of fake quotations:

Just this week you released a new book, Our President &Their Prayers: Proclamation of Faith by America’s Leaders, with co-author James Robison who “compiled and edited” the text. It too is full of fake quotations.

If you Google the language of the “National Prayer of Peace,” which you attribute to Thomas Jefferson, the first result is a page from the Thomas Jefferson Foundation debunking the quotation.

When we called Harold Holzer — who’s written 50 books on Abraham Lincoln and is the one of country’s foremost Lincoln scholars — to ask about a Lincoln quotation in your book, he replied, “Oh, not this again.”

You wrote that Lincoln said, “I know there is a God, and that He hates the injustice of slavery. I see the storm coming, and I know that His hand is in it. If He has a place and a work for me, and I think He has, I believe I am ready. I am nothing, but truth is everything. I know I am right, because I know that liberty is right, for Christ teaches it, and Christ is God.”

Holzer was clear.

“I hope Sen. Paul can find another Lincoln prayer to console him because Lincoln never uttered anything like this,” Holzer said. “It’s totally apocryphal. ‘Do unto others’ was more in Lincoln’s line. Not this.”

The quotation that leads off your chapter on George Washington — “let the world be filled with the knowledge of Thee and Thy Son, Jesus Christ” — is also fake. The source comes from a prayer book, The Daily Sacrifice, commonly attributed to Washington by evangelicals and conservative politicians, despite the fact it’s been routinely discredited by scholars.

The book does contain a real quotation from Reagan's 1983 Evil Empire speech.

And finally, that shrewdest of all observers of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, put it eloquently after he had gone on a search for the secret of America's greatness and genius—and he said: "Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the greatness and the genius of America. . . . America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."

But the real Reagan quotation includes a fake Tocqueville quotation.  As many posts have explained, the "America is good" line is totally bogus.

John Oliver Joins the War Against Fake Quotations

Many posts have discussed fake quotations from Lincoln, Jefferson, Tocqueville, and others.

Dieter Holger writes at Inquisitr:

John Oliver can’t stand fake quotes. On Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, the comedian blasted presidents and presidential candidates for saying quotes that founding fathers and historic politicians never said.

Oliver pointed to an October 5 interview with Ben Carson on Fox News, where the presidential candidate cited a false Thomas Jefferson quote on gun control.
“Thomas Jefferson himself said,” Carson said on Fox News. “‘Gun control works great for the people who are law-abiding citizens and it does nothing for the criminals, and all it does is put the people at risk.'”

Carson really cited a quote from Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria that was copied by Jefferson into his law school notebook. According to the Thomas Jefferson Society, the wrongly cited Beccaria quote is “spurious” since it’s not clear that Jefferson agreed or disagreed with Beccaria’s words.

“You cannot give people credit for things they copied into notebooks,” Olivers said. “Otherwise my teenage self would claim credit for the Pythagorean Theorem and most Smashing Pumpkins lyrics.”

...

In response to all the fake quotes, Oliver has created the website DefinitelyRealQuotes.com. There you can generate all sorts of fake (but entertaining) quote memes that are improperly attributed to historical figures.

“It seems we have a decision to make,” Oliver said. “Either we care about the accuracy of quotes and make sure they’re correctly sourced. Or, we don’t care at all.”

American Exceptionalism on the Fourth of July

At AEI, Gary J. Scmitt writes of Independence Day and American exceptionalism:

Here, for the first time in history, was a government whose legitimacy explicitly rested on the claims of human nature and not on common blood, soil, language, religion, or ancient tradition.

This is the true root of American exceptionalism and why it is more apt that we celebrate Independence Day on July 4th rather than July 2nd. It is the creed, the principles, of the Declaration that define the United States—not our successful break from British rule.

President Obama was surely right when he said that other nations, such as the Greeks, no doubt “believe in Greek exceptionalism” just as Americans believe in American exceptionalism. But this is to confuse and conflate “exceptionalism” with day-to-day “nationalism” and to overlook just how revolutionary and transformative the American experiment in liberal self-government was, and has been.

Up to that moment, republican rule was an exception, and an exception that occasionally but rarely dotted the landscape of political rule through the centuries. Today, through the growth of American power to support those universal principles—and, lest we forget, through our own bloody test of a civil war to ensure their survival—the world truly has been transformed.

At The New York Times, Allen C. Guelzo writes that Lincoln revered the Declaration but looked down on Jefferson's personal conduct and economic policies.

History is neither a political fable in which all the brothers are valiant and all the sisters virtuous, nor is it a tabloid exposé, full of crimes and follies, signifying nothing but victimization. There is, I admit, a caustic delight in unveiling the frailties of our Jeffersons (and our Lincolns). But the delight turns malevolent when it serves only to strip the American past of anything remarkable or exceptional, or when it demeans or discourages civic engagement and confidence.

Patriotism without criticism has no head; criticism without patriotism has no heart. Lincoln was capable of understanding both the greatness and the limits of Thomas Jefferson and the founders and still come out at the end embracing the American experiment for “giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time.” And so should we.

Jefferson, Patriotism, and Civic Education

At The Wall Street Journal, Donald Kagan writes:

Jefferson was convinced that there needed to be an education for all citizens if they and their new kind of popular government were to flourish. He understood that schools must provide "to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business; to enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts, and accounts, in writing."

For Jefferson, though, the most important goals of education were civic and moral. In his "Preamble to the 1779 Virginia Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge" he addresses the need for all students to have a political education through the study of the "forms of government," political history and foreign affairs. This was not meant to be a "value free" exercise; on the contrary, its purpose was to communicate the special virtues of republican representative democracy, the dangers that threatened it, and the responsibility of its citizens to esteem and protect it. This education was to be a common experience for all citizens, rich and poor, for every one of them had natural rights and powers, and every one had to understand and esteem the institutions, laws and traditions of his country if it was to succeed.
...
Jefferson meant American education to produce a necessary patriotism. Democracy—of all political systems, because it depends on the participation of its citizens in their own government and because it depends on their own free will to risk their lives in its defense—stands in the greatest need of an education that produces patriotism.

I recognize that I have said something shocking. The past half-century has seen a sharp turn away from what had been traditional attitudes toward the purposes and functions of education. Our schools have retreated from the idea of moral education, except for some attempts at what is called "values clarification," which is generally a cloak for moral relativism verging on nihilism of the sort that asserts that whatever feels good is good.

Even more vigorously have the schools fled from the idea of encouraging patriotism. In the intellectual climate of our time, the very suggestion brings contemptuous sneers or outrage, depending on the listener's mood. There is no end of quoting Samuel Johnson's famous remark that "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," but no recollection of Boswell's explanation that Johnson "did not mean a real and generous love for our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest."

Many have been the attacks on patriotism for intolerance, arrogance and bellicosity, but that is to equate it with its bloated distortion, chauvinism. My favorite dictionary defines the latter as "militant and boastful devotion to and glorification of one's country," but defines a patriot as "one who loves, supports, and defends his country."

President Obama on Ho Chi Minh

Meeting with the president of Vietnam, President Obama said this past week:

At the conclusion of the meeting, President Sang shared with me a copy of a letter sent by Ho Chi Minh to Harry Truman. And we discussed the fact that Ho Chi Minh was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson. Ho Chi Minh talks about his interest in cooperation with the United States. And President Sang indicated that even if it's 67 years later, it's good that we're still making progress.

At The Wall Street Journal, Ronald Radosh writes:

During World War II, Vietnam—a French colony—was taken over by Japan, and toward the end of the conflict, with Japan in retreat, a power vacuum developed. Ho Chi Minh, leading the Viet Minh communist guerrilla group, saw a chance to seize power before the French could restore colonial rule. He needed allies and knew that the American president, Franklin Roosevelt, had a reputation for being anti-French and anti-colonial. Thus began Ho's courtship of the U.S. by citing the Declaration of Independence and appealing to the American ideal of liberty.

His aim, according to Ho's biographer, William Duiker, was to "induce the United States to support the legitimacy of his government, rather than a return of the French."

In reality, Ho was a "disciplined Communist, who had "proved time and again his profound loyalty to Communism," according to the ex-communist German revolutionary Ruth Fischer, writing in Foreign Affairs in 1954. She had known him in Moscow in the 1920s when he was receiving his training.

Ho didn't get the U.S. support he sought, but he still succeeded in his national takeover, proclaiming himself president of a provisional government in what he called the Vietnam Democratic Republic. In October 1945, just how democratic the republic would be became clear: Ho ordered the slaughter of his political opponents, including 50,000 of the then-powerful Trotskyist communists. During a trip to Paris in late 1945, Ho told the French Socialist leader Daniel Guerin, "All those who do not follow the line which I have laid down will be broken."

Eight Random Things Presidents Never Said

For Presidents' Day:

"When governments fear the people, there is liberty," Jefferson did not say. "When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

Jefferson did not say: "My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government."

"I am not bound to win, but I'm bound to be true," Lincoln did not say. "I'm not bound to succeed, but I'm bound to live up to what light I have."

"As a result of the war,"Lincoln did not say, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow."

"We are a great country because we are a good country," Lincoln did not say -- and neither did Tocqueville.

"I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights," Lincoln really really did not say.

"It’s a great invention," Rutherford B. Hayes did not say of the telephone, "but who would ever want to use one?" 

Nixon did not say that he had a "secret plan" to end the Vietnam War.

A Critical View of State of the Union Speeches

George Will deplores the practice of delivering the State of the Union as a speech instead of a written message:

When the Founding generation was developing customs and manners appropriate to a republic, George Washington and John Adams made the mistake of going to Congress to do their constitutional duty of informing and recommending. Jefferson, however, disliked the sound of his voice — such an aversion is a vanishingly rare presidential virtue — and considered it monarchical for the executive to lecture the legislature, the lofty instructing underlings. So he sent written thoughts to Capitol Hill, a practice good enough for subsequent presidents until Wilson in 1913 delivered his message orally, pursuant to the progressives’ belief in inspirational and tutelary presidents.

It is beyond unseemly, it is anti-constitutional for senior military officers and, even worse, Supreme Court justices to attend these political rallies where, with metronomic regularity, legislators of the president’s party leap to their feet to whinny approval of every bromide and vow. Members of the other party remain theatrically stolid, thereby provoking brow-furrowing punditry about why John Boehner did not rise (to genuflect? salute? swoon?) when Barack Obama mentioned this or that. Tuesday night, the justices, generals and admirals, looking as awkward as wallflowers at a prom, at least stayed seated.

In any case, the speech is no longer meeting the Wilsonian goal of swaying public opinion, because the public is not watching.  Constitution Daily reports:

The final TV viewership numbers are in for President Obama’s State of the Union speech, and the broadcast hit a historic low in one of two key ratings categories.

Nielsen says the State of the Union was seen by 33.5 million people, which is the lowest number since 2000 and the second-lowest total since 1993, when the agency first started combined measuring for the event.

The combined rating for the 2013 speech was 21.5, which is the lowest in history. President Bill Clinton’s speech in 2000 had a rating of 22.4. The rating number represents the percentage of possible households that have TV sets and could watch the speech.

In other words, nearly 80 percent of American households skipped watching the State of the Union live or on a tape-delayed basis on TV.

Fake Quotations on Guns

Many posts here have discussed fake quotations from famous figures, including Jefferson. Gun control is one subject, as CNN reports (h/t Brian Sutter):

The Founding Fathers are frequently quoted in the gun control debate, but many of those quotations turn out to be fake.

The most popular comment on a recent story about gun control featured a purported quotation from Thomas Jefferson. More than 2,000 votes pushed it to the top.

"When governments fear the people, there is liberty," reads the quotation. "When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

The same quotation has been posted dozens of times in other readers' posts. Some readers worked to debunk it by mentioning Monticello.org, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation's website, which has a section devoted to "spurious" quotations that have been attributed to the third president of the United States. The website lists several variations of the quotation, featured on two pages, and says staff "have not found any evidence that Thomas Jefferson said or wrote" those words.

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The GunCite website includes quotations from the founding fathers, but has pages for debunked and reliable remarks. Site creator Howard Picard said the quotes help explain the Constitution's meaning.

"There are politicians, scholars, jurists, and others who don't believe the Second Amendment was intended to preserve and guarantee an individual right to arms outside of active militia duty," Picard said. "Some go as far as to claim firearms ownership was solely a collective right."
He said the quotes show that the Second Amendment was intended to protect not only a "vigorous individual right" but also "to serve as a check against an usurpation of our government."

Saul Cornell, a professor at Fordham University, said some quotations may need context, especially those from the "losing side" of debates. He added that he believes both sides of the gun conversation tend to oversimplify the Founding Fathers' historical intent.

"Without being too professorial about it," he said, "depending on what theory of the Constitution we use, you can get very different interpretations of the Second Amendment."

The Language of the Lincoln Movie

Steven Spielberg's Lincoln is a magnificent film that gets the big things right.  The script beautifully articulates his belief in self-evident truths:

Here are his actual words, in an 1859 letter:

One would start with great confidence that he could convince any sane child that the simpler propositions of Euclid are true; but, nevertheless, he would fail, utterly, with one who should deny the definitions and axioms. The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society.

But the picture errs in some smaller ways. At The Atlantic, Benjamin Schmidt writes:

I'm not the first to look at the historical accuracy of Lincoln's language. But by using massive databases of digital texts—in particular, the Ngrams corpus that Google created in collaboration with the Cultural Observatory at Harvard, where I have a fellowship—I can do it very comprehensively. Kushner relied on his ears to know when to look up a particular word. I lack that sensitivity, so instead I have a computer program that can tackle the problem more crudely: It simply checks every single word and phrase of up to three words (in Lincoln, there are 15,000 of them) to flag places where the script seems to be departing from language published in books. This "anachronism machine" produces dozens of potential leads I can track down in dictionaries, old newspapers, and other sources.Using computers for tasks like this is useful because it gives a completely different perspective. The statistics can help uncover shifts in American language and culture over the last century and a half that no one has noticed—although we still have to decide what they mean.

Schmidt finds many anachronisms, such as the term "peace talks," which comes from the latter half of the 20th century, and the name "Kevin," which was extremely rare in the United States of 1865.

Even the phrase "13th Amendment" is out of place. At the time, people just said the "constitutional amendment" or the "slavery amendment": It had been 60 years since the last amendment, and no one was in the habit of numbering them. The same sort of mistake dogs the movie's discussion of racial equality. One particular character makes more than his share of this sort of mistake: the radical Congressman Asa Vintner Litton (Stephen Spinella, playing a composite character who seems most closely based on Henry Winter Davis). In one of the film's key scenes, Stevens refuses to state his belief in full equality to Congress in order to help the amendment on its way. Litton is furious: "You refused to say that all humans are, well... human!" But in 1865, referring to people as "humans" was slang, not an elevating way of being inclusive. Had a real Asa Litton wanted to express the notion of universal equality, he would have, like Thomas Jefferson a century before or Lyndon Johnson a century later, mentioned "all men;" even if he were being gender-neutral, he would have said "persons." In a similar vein, Litton and Ashley each talk about "racial equality" and "race equality" as the eventual goal, but the phrase would have been "Negro equality." Nowadays, that sounds like a completely meaningless difference, but actually, the difference between "Negro" and "racial" equality underscores just how adaptable American racism can be. One of the strangest results of "Negro equality" in Reconstruction was a short period when the California supreme court re-interpreted a law that prohibited blacks, Native Americans, and Chinese from testifying against white men: Thanks to the actions of the Radicals in Congress, blacks were now free from Chinese testimony as well.

Fake Jefferson Quotations

Previous posts have discussed fake quotations from Lincoln, Tocqueville, and Jefferson, among others.  At The Wall Street Journal, Cameron McWhirter writes about fake Jefferson:

Thomas Jefferson once famously wrote, "All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent."

Or did he? Numerous social movements attribute the quote to him. "The Complete Idiot's Guide to U.S. Government and Politics" cites it in a discussion of American democracy. Actor Chuck Norris's 2010 treatise "Black Belt Patriotism: How to Reawaken America" uses it to urge conservatives to become more involved in politics. It is even on T-shirts and decals.

Yet the founding father and third U.S. president never wrote it or said it, insists Anna Berkes, a 33-year-old research librarian at the Jefferson Library at Monticello, his grand estate just outside Charlottesville, Va. Nor does he have any connection to many of the "Jeffersonian" quotes that politicians on both sides of the aisle have slung back and forth in recent years, she says.

The piece offers a guide,  "How to Spot a Fake Jefferson Quote."

Tips from Anna Berkes, a research librarian at the Jefferson Library at Monticello

• Word Contractions: Jefferson almost never used them. 

• "You" as an indefinite pronoun: He rarely used the second person singular unless he was addressing someone directly. 

• Modern language: Quotes about American gumption or industriousness, presenting a "pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps" sentiment, are unlikely to have come from Jefferson. He was a wealthy planter in what was then a largely non-urban country. 

• Pithy aphorisms: "The ability to encapsulate his entire philosophy on a topic in one sentence was not among Jefferson's many talents," according to Ms. Berkes. 

• No citation: If there is no citation for a primary document, that is a red flag. 

• Only appears in modern publications: "If you search further for the quotation on Google Books ... and the only place you find it is in business and self-help books, it's almost certain doom," according to Ms. Berkes

Several of these tips apply more broadly.  The "modern language" item provided an instant way to spot a fake Lincoln quotation:  the Great Emancipator could not have said that corporations had "hijacked" democracy because the word did not exist in his lifetime.

Is 2012 More Like 1948, 1996 ... or 1800?

The year before the presidential election, the Democratic incumbent grapples with unfavorable poll numbers and strong Republican opposition on Capitol Hill. That's the situation facing President Obama today. The description also applies to President Truman in 1947 and President Clinton in 1995. Truman and Clinton ended up winning, so a natural question is whether their campaigns could be models for the current president.

Truman ran against the "do-nothing" 80th Congress, reckoning that it was far less popular than GOP presidential candidate Thomas Dewey. In his famous acceptance speech, Truman spent much of his time lambasting the Republicans in Congress and did not even utter Dewey's name.

Clinton took a different approach, attacking Republican nominee Bob Dole by linking him to the much-disliked GOP Speaker Newt Gingrich. At the same time, however, he "triangulated" by separating himself from Democrats in Congress over issues such as welfare reform.

Some say that the path to victory lies in the Truman strategy, while others point to the Clinton path. But both are flawed models for 2012.

First of all, whereas both chambers had GOP majorities in 1948 and 1996, only the House is in Republican hands now. Democratic control of the Senate greatly complicates any effort to run against Congress.

Second, House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are more adept at national politics than their counterparts in the earlier elections. Their poll numbers are currently unfavorable, but neither is prone to gaffes.

Third and most important, the economy is in a slump, and will probably stay there through 2012. The White House itself projects that high unemployment will persist. In 1948 and 1996, by contrast, growth was strong in the months before the election. One could argue that the economy had much more to do with the victories of Truman and Clinton than their campaigns did.

So what can President Obama do? After talking to top Democrats inside the White House and Congress, Reporter Howard Fineman has the answer:

"It's not going to be a 'Morning in America' campaign, it's going to be a darkness at midnight campaign about the Republicans. It's going to be about the fact that the Republicans in Congress pushed Paul Ryan's bill Medicare, about how they pushed Cut, Cap and Balance. It's about how Republicans wanted to dismantle Wall Street reform. It's going to be about how the Republican presidential candidates have embraced the Tea Party."

"Those are going to be the two central messages of a campaign that's mostly going to be about attack. I think this is -- just like 2008 was in some respects an uplifting campaign, from both sides, this one is going to be down and dirty from the beginning from both sides."

In that sense, the election will be like that of 1800, which supporters of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson filled the papers with scurrilous verbal assaults.See some mock TV ads based on actual statements from the 1800 campaign:

The difference is that the 2012 campaign won't result in the election of an Adams or a Jefferson.