If it’s fake but true, can we dispense with the fakery?

“The trouble with quotes on the Internet is that it’s difficult to determine whether or not they are genuine.” – Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln was right, damn it! And the prescience of the man is unbelievable, for when he said that, the Internet had not yet been invented by Al Gore!

As to whether Lincoln actually said that, can the 165,000 links quoting him all be wrong?

From time to time I get distracted trying to verify quotes on the Internet. It is not an easy process, and simply Googling the quote does not solve the problem. If a quote is popular, Googling it will only result in many thousands of links to others quoting it. This may create the appearance of reliability in some minds, but when I see a quote from a famous person and can’t find a single links to a biography, published article, government source, or newspaper interview, my skepticism deepens.

Anyway, while I have been unable to verify a particular quote about the war on drugs I had wanted to verify, I did stumble onto two reliable and verified quotes I thought were worth sharing.

Two famous men who couldn’t have been more different both reached similar conclusions about Prohibition:

John D. Rockefeller:

When Prohibition was introduced, I hoped that it would be widely supported by public opinion and the day would soon come when the evil effects of alcohol would be recognized. I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe that this has not been the result. Instead, drinking has generally increased; the speakeasy has replaced the saloon; a vast army of lawbreakers has appeared; many of our best citizens have openly ignored Prohibition; respect for the law has been greatly lessened; and crime has increased to a level never seen before.[2]

Albert Einstein:

The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this.

But alas! Abraham Lincoln is also said to have condemned prohibition (even though “prohibition” was not yet a term in vogue), and there are many favorite quotes floating around — but the most popular ones are fake, and this researcher spent a lot of time looking into the background of my favorite of the fakes. It seems to date back to 1926:

1926 Senate National Prohibition Law hearings page 281

TESTIMONY OF MATTHEW WOLL:

Abraham Lincoln, the great emancipator, made a similar statement in the Illinois House of Representatives, December 18, 1840, which can be found on page 136 of the Journal of the House of that date:

“Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principle upon which our Government was founded.”

Bravo, Honest Abe!

Except the Lincoln quote is not to be found in the Illinois Journal of the House of that date, either on page 136 or anywhere else.

Woll’s testimony is quoted in full here, and he used the Lincoln quote to supply the final clincher of his argument.

A pity that he attributed it to Lincoln, because by doing so he undermined an otherwise valid point. That’s the problem with fake quotes. They breathe authority into arguments which really ought to be able to stand or fall without them.

I don’t need Lincoln’s authority to tell me what I know. He didn’t have to say you can’t fool all the people all the time. Nor did Barnum.