Posted on 01/28/2006 7:27:04 AM PST by SirLinksalot
The Weekly Standard
November 13, 1995
By John J. Pitney, Jr.
Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America is a beloved, canonical text; the urge to quote from it is understandably great. Politicians ever seek to demonstrate familiarity with it, from Bill Clinton to Pat Buchanan. One of their favorite quotes runs as follows:
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I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers - and it was not there . . . in her fertile fields and boundless forests and it was not there . . . in her rich mines and her vast world commerc - and it was not there . . . in her democratic Congress and her matchless Constitution - and it vas not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.
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These lines are uplifting and poetic. They are also spurious. Nowhere do they appear in Democracy in America, or anywhere else in Tocqueville.
The authenticity of the passage came into question when first-year government students at Claremont McKenna College received an assignment: Find a contemporary speech quoting Tocqueville, and determine how accurately the speaker used the quotation. A student soon uncovered a recent Senate floor speech that cited the "America is great" line. He scoured Democracy in America, but could not find the passage. The professor looked, too - and it was not there.
Further research led to reference books that cautiously referred to the quotation as "unverified" and "attributed to de Tocqueville but not found in his works." These references, in turn, pointed to the apparent source: a 1941 book on religion and the American dream. The book quoted the last two lines of the passage as coming from Democracy in America but supplied no documentation. (The author may have mistaken his own notes for a verbatim quotation, a common problem in the days before photocopiers.) The full version of the quotation appeared 11 years later, in an Eisenhower campaign speech. Ike, however, attributed it not directly to Tocqueville but to "a wise philosopher [who] came to this country ...."
One may conjecture that Eisenhower's speechwriter embellished the lines from the 1941 book and avoided a direct reference to Tocqueville as a way of covering himself. Speechwriters do such things from time to time. In his wonderful primer on politics, Playing to Win, Jeff Greenfield presented a model stump speech complete with a fake quotation from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. "If you are worried about being found out," Greenfield wrote, "change 'Heraclitus' to 'The Poet.'" (See page 117 of Greenfield, if you'd like to check.)
Whatever its origin, the passage found its way into circulation. President Reagan used it in a 1982 speech, though his speechwriter hedged by attributing it to Eisenhower's quotation of Tocqueville. Two years later, Reagan declared that Tocqueville "is said to have observed that 'America is great because America is good.'" Thereafter, his speechwriters grew less careful, and several subsequent Reagan addresses quoted from the passage without any qualifications. At this point, it started showing up with greater frequency in political rhetoric.
In 1987, Rep. William Dannemeyer quoted the passage's final line, adding that "America ceased to be good in 1971, when America's promise to pay ceased to be good." He was referring to President Nixon's decision to close the gold window. Apparently, Dannemeyer disapproved.
The day after President Clinton's inauguration, Sen. Jesse Helms performed an ecumenical paraphrase on the line about churches: "As the remarkable French statesman Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the 1850s, the source of American virtue . . . will always be found in the churches and synagogues of America."
In 1994, Bill Clinton tapped the passage to temper his "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no" speech in Boston. "I believe fundamentally in the common sense and the essential core goodness of the American people. Don't forget that Alexis de Tocqueville said a long time ago that America is great because America is good; and if America ever ceases to be good, she will no longer be great."
And now, synthetic Tocqueville is appearing in the 1996 campaign. Pat Buchanan used the "America is great" line in the speech announcing his candidacy, and Phil Gramm invoked the flaming pulpits in his May address to Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.
It's a shame that politicians are using a knockoff product when the real thing is so fine. Democracy in America offers profound analyses of the roles of religion, morality, and voluntary action, though its insights are subtler than the purple prose of the counterfeit.
Why does faux Tocqueville thrive? It took only a modest effort to expose the quotation as a phony, so how could it have circulated so widely for so long? We could make a nasty crack about politicians who cannot tell Alexis de Tocqueville from Maurice Chevalier, but that would be irrelevant since they seldom write their own material anyway. The lyrics of politics come from staffers, whose tight deadlines often keep them from checking original sources. When they need a quotation (or a statistic or an anecdote), they lift it from a speech or an article by somebody else. That somebody probably got it from another piece, whose author got it from . . . you get the picture. Bad information tends to linger and spread.
Here is a personal brush. In 1992, I served on the staff of the Republican platform committee. We came across the "America is great" line in an old Reagan speech. Though we could not verify it, we still wanted to use it in the platform, so we attributed it to "an old adage."
Of course, after decades of repetition, it has in fact become an old adage. It just isn't Tocqueville's.
ping
Oh. Ya learn the darnest things on FR.
> Say what you want about the famous quote attributed to Tocqueville -- it's like feeding chicken soup to a corpse, it ain't going to hurt anything.
Uh... huh.
"You know all that stuuf people say about me being divine? It's rubbish. When I was young, I bummed around with my posse and performed some magic tricks, including a pretty good escape trick." - Jesus of Nazareth, 64 AD
"We got about 500 miles out, and then decided to turn north and go to Iceland. We partied for a while and then went back and claimed we'd gotten to India. Imagine my surprise... " Christopher Columbus, 1497
"Actually, she didn't drown... I strangled her in a drunken rage and then dumped the car to make it look like an accident." Teddy The Swimmer, 1974
"The American people would have to be complete fu--ing morons if they allow Social Security to continue for another minute." FDR, 1941
"Wow. I still can't believe they baught it." A. Hitler, 1956
Yeah, let's just make stuff up. Ain't going to hurt anything.
Mohammed professed to derive from Heaven, and has inserted in the Koran, not only religious doctrines, but political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and theories of science.
The Gospel, on the contrary, speaks only of the general relations of men to God and to each other, beyond which it inculcates and imposes no point of faith.
This alone, besides a thousand other reasons, would suffice to prove that the former of these religions will never long predominate in a cultivated and democratic age, while the latter is destined to retain its sway at these as at all other periods.
At the time he wrote this, as I recall, the Ottoman Turkish Empire was still quite large ....
Do you think people who have used the quote are liars?
Amazing that it came from a frogFrenchman.
Both France and America could do well to remember his words.
The godless and thereby souless Americans who would delete God from our society are driving us farther and farther away from our roots, our genius and our power.
Sleazywood, newsrags, magazines, T.V., books (Oprah as a book critic HAS to be the depth of low taste on our planet.), pop music and fashion-for-the-young all strive for their Almightly Buch AND desperately try to inculcate our society down the path of least resistance.
It's bad enough to be such a money-grubbing society but to add the agenda of DESPERATELY leading our people down the sleaziest, lowest, coarsest, crudest, most vulgar, least uplifting, least moral path is the very worst. They show us the low road.
Music and its collection of pornography put all the sewage to rhythm so we can dance and drive ourselves to relative moralism (If it feels good, do it. I'm a victim.).
Sleazywood produces a steady flow of anti-American, anti-police, anti-military movies, stupid, vapid comedies, action and sci-fi movies which denegrate non-minority males as weak, stupid anti-heroes to be saved, in the nick of time no less, by strong, balanced, smart women and minority heroes.
T.V. adds its might with its steady flow of comedic, dramatic, historical-lying, left-wing news and analysis septic fuel. Americans cackle, crow, guffaw and applaud at the soft porn, homosexual comedy, self-aborbption, youth-minority-woman worshipping casts and agenda-driven dramas and consider themselves well entertained.
Even the History Channel manages to skew the world. I remember one "Story of Jesus" production that said that Jesus was "probably" only a stonemason, probably got married, had children and was really nothing but a "good man" who really didn't perform any miracles. That was just mob hysteria and wannabe fairytale storytelling. After all, there were tons of "Jesuses" at the time with Messianic fervor a norm.
Fox News ran a "Story of Jesus" that I HAD to turn off, it was so anti-Christ.
I often go to the "religious" section of this site just to read some uplifting, positive stuff, even if it's only the latest debate within the Episcopalian Church or the latest rantings of the Russian and other Orthodoxies. Hope they don't catch me at this. They are rather touchy. :o)
Is there a smaller font than one? Say a "1/8" font? Lol.
I hope you're not one of'em! Yikes.
Do you know how much faith I have in the first-year college student (all of 18-years-old and his professor (left wing communist leanings perhaps, hoping to drive this "find" to a book)?
ZERO.
Let's determine the accuracy of the student and professor and what their agenda might possibly be.
Let's verify these verifiers.
Just because THEY didn't find it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
Did they go to France and read French resources? Did they read French resources here? Or was this merely a Google search?
Like I said, I trust THEIR methodology and judgement as much as I trust MSNBC's.
MLC9852 said: I agree.
I don't think this interesting article suggested that any great harm came from the invented quote which, everyone seems to agree, is rather bracing.
I think many of us regard the correcting of such things as a mildly useful amusement. It is not an attack on the quote or the people who have used it.
As others have eloquently said here, there is a value to getting our history correct. I just don't see getting defensive about people -- with no agenda or edge -- making corrections in the historical record. I'm sure you both don't really mean to be standing up for the idea that historical errors should be let stand. It is okay to breeze on by such corrections if they hold no interest for you. No need to take an active stand for ignorance and error.
Do you know how much faith I have in the first-year college student (all of 18-years-old and his professor (left wing communist leanings perhaps, hoping to drive this "find" to a book)?
ZERO.
Let's determine the accuracy of the student and professor and what their agenda might possibly be.
Let's verify these verifiers.
Just because THEY didn't find it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
Did they go to France and read French resources? Did they read French resources here? Or was this merely a Google search?
I trust THEIR methodology and judgement as much as I trust MSNBC's.
It's a good line, with a lot of truth in it.
While it would be interesting to find out who did in fact come up with it first... the inability to attribute it doesn't change the essence of the point.
This article doesn't even prove for that matter that Tocqueville didn't say it. This article merely points out that it isn't in Democracy in America, where everybody thought it was. It does sound like something Tocqueville might have said... and it remains possible that he did say it. He just didn't say it in that book.
It's a little over the top to call any of it a "lie". To discover that something you've always thought to be true... is not... is hardly a lie. It's a mistake. I scarcely think that there's been some farreaching conspiracy to go around attributing interesting quotes to obscure French writers. Maybe there was, but I missed the meetings.
"But there are others who look forward to a republican form of government as a tranquil and lasting state, towards which modern society is daily impelled by the ideas and manners of the time, and who sincerely desire to prepare men to be free. When these men attack religious opinions, they obey the dictates of their passions and not of their interests. Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. Religion is much more necessary in the republic which they set forth in glowing colors than in the monarchy which they attack; it is more needed in democratic republics than in any others. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity? "
I've read Democracy in America. The quote isn't there. I have a Ph.D.
Unfortunately, news of our errors does not always arrive from our friends.
I would say that the priority (in this dusty and trivial matter) would be to find the truth ~~before~~ loading up for an ad hominem charge in the culture wars.
You are correct, but this isn't a big deal, if Tocqueville said it fine, if not not we simply quit attributing it to him. I do believe we need to be obsessive about accuracy in history
Since we can no longer attribute it to De Toqueville, in future just credit me with it.
If I've said it once, I've said it, well, a dozen times. OK, not in print, but I said it.
So just say, "as the mighty marron often said..."
Yes, since the alternative is that they're ignoramuses.
LOL
Thus they're lying. No way around it.
In Robert Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land he has his character Jubal Harshaw say:
"Once, when I was a kid in high school, I won a debate on shipping subsidies by quoting an overwhelming argument from the files of the British Colonial Shipping Board. The opposition was totally unable to refute me - because there never was a 'British Colonial Shipping Board.' I had made it up, whole cloth.
You can usually only get away with that stuff if you can somehow arrange it so that no one will ever check.
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