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Regardless of the slogan on T-shirts and beer council ad campaigns, Benjamin Franklin never said, "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."
What he did extol was wine, while making a larger point about the miracles of springtime. "We hear of the conversion of water into wine at the marriage in Cana as of a miracle," Franklin wrote (in French!) in a 1779 letter to his friend the Abbé André Morellet. "But this conversion is, through the goodness of God, made every day before our eyes. Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine—a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy."
Try putting that on a T-shirt.
Keyes calls this process bumper-stickering. It's the process that renders Churchill's "blood, toil, tears, and sweat" into "blood, sweat, and tears." And turns baseball manager Leo Durocher's "The nice guys are all over there—in seventh place" as the pithier "Nice guys finish last." A full word is saved by saying "Beam me up, Scotty," although the actual Star Trek line is "Beam us up, Mr. Scott."
President Reagan certainly fit Ernest Hemingway's definition of courage—"grace under pressure" (yes, Hemingway really did say this)—when he told first lady Nancy Reagan, "Honey, I forgot to duck," after he was shot. This may have been spontaneous, but it wasn't original. Jack Dempsey said it to his wife after losing the heavyweight boxing title to Gene Tunney in 1926. The president perhaps assumed that everyone would know the reference. Nonetheless, it is often attributed to Reagan.
The past couple of years, as the federal budget has ballooned out of control, Washington wags have been reprising a line usually attributed to former Illinois Republican Everett Dirksen, who served on Capitol Hill from 1933 to 1969: "A billion here, a billion there—pretty soon you're talking about real money." Actually, it's an old Depression-era line; a variation of the quip was once even attached to Herbert Hoover. But Dirksen was more popular than Hoover. Who wants to hear from the politician most closely associated with the Great Depression? So the line caught on with Dirksen's name attached.
Many of the sayings often attributed to Ben Franklin were ones he actually appropriated and put into the mouth of Richard in his Colonial-era guide to life, Poor Richard's Almanack. Franklin didn't pretend his sayings were original: "Why then should I give my Readers bad lines of my own," he asked in his 1747 Almanack, "when good ones of other People's are so plenty?" Thus, "A word to the wise is sufficient" and "Early to bed, early to rise …" are Franklin's—but not originally.
As a flypaper figure, Franklin is also given credit for words uttered by his contemporaries, such as: "We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately." If this was said at all, it was most likely by Richard Penn, the governor of Pennsylvania during the American Revolution.
There is an old newsroom saying, "too good to check"—meaning, if it's too good to check, it probably isn't true. Conservatives may wish that Dwight D. Eisenhower, when asked if he thought he'd made mistakes as president, had replied, "Yes, two, and they are both sitting on the Supreme Court." It captured his frustration with the liberal tendencies of Earl Warren and William Brennan. But the oft-repeated story is unsourced. True, Eisenhower once told a Republican leader privately that appointing Warren was "one of the two biggest mistakes I made in my administration," according to an oral history at the Eisenhower library. But the quip itself has been attributed to other presidents and is probably apocryphal.
This kind of thing has gotten worse in the era of the Internet. Surely, liberal activist and singer Barbra Streisand thought she was being profound at a 2002 fund-raising concert for the Democratic Party when she read what she thought was a soliloquy from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor … When the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry … How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar." Streisand was trying to allude to George W. Bush, but this was no more Shakespeare than it was Dr. Seuss. It was an Internet hoax, which Streisand was forced to acknowledge.
Another Web story involves Miriam Amanda "Ma" Ferguson, Texas's first woman governor. Someone suggested that the new Spanish-speaking immigrants might benefit from classes taught in their native language. Furious, Ma picked up the King James Version of the New Testament and shouted, "If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for Texas!"
Ma has been credited with this goofy statement by New York Times columnist William Safire and Texas humorist Kinky Friedman, among others, none of whom has ever cited a source. Of course, that would be difficult. Ma Ferguson was a college-educated progressive, and it's highly unlikely she said it. The yarn, in fact, dates to at least 1881, when Ferguson was six.
Republican president Calvin Coolidge's most famous line is "The business of America is business." To this day, Democrats won't give it a rest. Just last October, West Virginia senator Robert Byrd quoted it on the floor of the Senate. Did Coolidge really make the remark about the primacy of profit? The answer is, not really.
In a 1925 speech, Coolidge did utter these words: "After all, the chief business of the American people is business." But he was building to a different point—the opposite one: "Of course the accumulation of wealth cannot be justified as the chief end of existence. We want wealth, but there are many other things that we want very much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism."
There's another American trait that competes with idealism—and that's our desire to sound hip and not overly sentimental, especially about our politics. Wasn't it Harry Truman who casually dismissed his critics by stating that if you really want a friend in Washington, you should buy a dog? Actually, no. The line is fake, even though it's often attributed to Truman. But President Obama still used it himself, although mercifully without blaming poor Harry. Appearing on The Tonight Show in March, the president said, "You know, they say if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog."
Yes, "they" do say that. But perhaps what they ought to say is, "If you want to help a friend in Washington, get him a reliable quote book." That's Ben Franklin.
Well, no—but it could have been.
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