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Schools

You Can Fool Some of the People All the Time

KSU's Dr. David Parker explores the myths and realities of the legendary Lincoln quote.

Dr. David Parker recalled having lunch with Abraham Lincoln last year.

“Well, an Abraham Lincoln impersonator,” the history professor told the audience during an April 7 lecture. When the hostess asked “Lincoln” if he wanted a “booth,” Parker said he replied with, “Shh! He doesn’t like hearing that word!”

Parker’s lecture, entitled “Fooling the People: On the Trail of an Abraham Lincoln Quote” was presented as part of the Sturgis Library’s ongoing “Night at the Athenaeum” series, coordinated by the university’s Department of Museums, Archives & Rare Books.

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Parker said the lecture was born out of an experience he had as a newspaper columnist in Cartersville, Ga. After spotting a misspelling of the word “y’all” in a John Grisham novel, Parker began researching the historical roots of the contraction. Parker traced the first print appearance of the word to 1858, which coincides with the supposed utterance of the legendary Lincoln witticism, “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

Parker, however, questioned the authenticity of the attribution and began researching the timeline of the aphorism. Parker said the quote, as well as the sourcing of the quote to Lincoln, debuted in a Milwaukee Daily Journal article from October 1886. From there, the quote was reprinted and rephrased in a number of publications, from The New York Times to underground anarchist journals.

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Although the supposed Lincoln quote was initially used within a political context, Parker said the quote didn’t become a part of American lore until it was introduced as an advertising tool.

 “Lincoln has been used to sell a distressing amount of alcohol,” Parker joked during the lecture. After the publication of a print collection called “Abe Lincoln’s Yarns and Stories” in 1901, Parker said the quote was used in countless print advertisements, for everything from Canadian Whiskey to women’s overcoats.

“I’m still amazed, because a lot of those advertisements and stories were not obscure," Parker said. “They weren’t in the East Podunk-whatever, they were in The New York Times.”

“Lincoln might have said it, he may not have said it,“ Parker stated. “What I’ve been interested in is how did the thing come about being attributed to Lincoln?”

Parker doesn’t believe he found the first sourcing of the quote to Lincoln, and believes that the aphorism is more than likely a misattribution. Parker compared the quote to the legend of George Washington chopping down his father’s cherry tree, which was originally fabricated for a biography in 1806.

“Once this story appeared,” Parker said, “everybody knows about the cherry tree, and it starts appearing everywhere. It had been nowhere, and now it’s everywhere. I think that’s what happened in 1886 with that quotation. I suspect what happened was that earlier that year, a few months earlier, someone did a biography of Lincoln, a book length biography or maybe a major magazine article somewhere, and told the story that connected, just like Washington and the cherry tree, Lincoln saying something about fooling all the people.”

“My guess is that it appeared in some book, as a popular biography people would buy, and in three years, nobody would remember it,” Parker said. “People read it, and it started showing up in different contexts.”

Parker said he finds the association of the quote to Lincoln “flabbergasting.”

“I have no idea how to explain that,” Parker concluded his presentation. “It really is a wondrous invention.”

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