Here’s more proof that the anti-war movement can be funnier than a truckload of undocumented baloney.
Illinois state historian Thomas Schwartz hopes the Internet site will draw scholars checking the credibility of Lincoln quotes as well as curious browsers. Not all the Lincoln stories and documents they use are real, he said. "People will use them anyway, because it’s become part of a mythic image of Lincoln that we all feel comfortable with and that has just become something so familiar," Schwartz said. "We don’t want to give it up."
Maybe that’s understandable. After all, Lincoln himself said, "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time." Well, actually, he didn’t say that. Allegedly part of a September 1858 speech delivered in Clinton, the sentence does not show up in the text printed in the local newspaper, Schwartz said. The best evidence available comes from two people recollecting about 1910 that he actually said it in 1856 in Bloomington, in his famous "Lost Speech" — so-called because no transcript of it was taken.
Here’s another fake Lincoln quote: "There’s no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There’s nothing good in war except its ending." Attributed to Lincoln by anti-war protesters earlier this year, the statement actually was made by an actor portraying Lincoln in an episode of "Star Trek." |