UPDATE #2 – Let’s be nice to Dave. We’ve had some enjoyable sparring, but I don’t want it to shed more heat than light. I instigated this, so I’d like to tone this down.
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UPDATE: Dave Maass replies in the comments. I append one tiny question he failed to answer.
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“I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.”
President Warren G. Harding reportedly uttered these damning words about his inadequacy for the office. CityBeat writer and SD Rostra groupie Dave Maass, in rebutting an SD Rostra post praising Harding’s tax-cutting response to a recession that began in 1920, stated in the comments that Harding “reportedly” uttered these words.
Warren G. Harding
“Reportedly,” however, is not the same as confirmed. It’s often a tip-off the writer doesn’t have confirmation from a primary source. (Confession: I’ve used that weasel-word myself). So my journalistic hackles rose on hearing that word. It’s a great quote to discredit Harding’s presidency, almost too good to be true.
Perhaps it is.
In my reply to Maass in the comments, I said he should do a little research to confirm the quote’s authenticity. Diligent reporter concerned with accuracy that he is, Maass is presumably burning the midnight oil. Out of compassion, I decided to help with the research. (And if I’m wrong in my suspicions and my snark backfires, I wanted to be the first to find out).
Over the last day and a half, I’ve sporadically Googled the quote, looking to find a primary source, and have had virtually no luck. None of those using the phrase, including a 2007 U.S. News and World Report article by Jay Tolson Dave cited, gave a reference. Creative Loafing, the Atlanta alternative weekly, published a juvenile anti-Bush article in 2009 that offhandedly attributed the quote to a “diary admission.”
The closest I’ve been able to find as a source is Wikiquote, which cites a 1939 book by Nicholas Murray Butler (1939) Across the Busy Years vol. 1. That’s not exactly a plenitude of confirmation, although it’s better than nothing. I would have thought such a startling quote would have been written about more extensively. It would have provided rich material for historians and student papers. Perhaps these exist, but just aren’t accessible to my information valet, Mr. Google.
So right now all I have is a very inadequate reference, not enough to prove the quote authentic. The reference doesn’t specify to whom Harding spoke these words, or even the year in which he spoke them. For such a startling admission of failure, that’s very thin. The lack of firm sourcing worried a Wikipedia contributor, “KarlFrei” who in 2008 argued against the quote’s inclusion in its article on Harding:
“This quote was mentioned prominently in the article, in the summary at the start, but with a bad source. I have looked a little bit (standard google search) but have been unable to locate an authoritative source for this quote, just several trivia lists and quote lists. Since this is a rather extreme statement for a president in office to make, I think we need a really good source here, ideally a newspaper from the time.
“As a bare minimum, we should be able to establish exactly *when* he said this and to whom, and perhaps also in what circumstances. None of the sources I found provide any background, they simply repeat the quote verbatim. As long as we cannot even pin a date on this quote, I do not believe it should be in this encyclopedia.”
KarlFrei appears to have won the point: the alleged Harding quote is not to be found in his Wikipedia entry as of the night of June 15.
But perhaps there is such an authoritative source for this quote, specifying its date and circumstances. I’ve not had much success so far. So I’m turning to the SD Rostra community to help Dave Maass prove its authenticity. {snark} Such a widely used quote simply has to be accurate, otherwise, all the journalists who used it would be wrong. And it’s simply inconceivable that such a journalistic consensus would be in error.{/snark}.
Gentle readers, please comment, with link if possible, to any sources that shed light on this matter. And please hurry. Because if Dave is correct, I’d like you to provide the confirmation. That will be some consolation as I eat crow.
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(DISCLAIMER: This article by Bradley J. Fikes does not necessarily reflect the opinion of his employer, the North County Times.)
Comments 18
Dear Mr. Fikes:
LOL.
I actually did spend several minutes researching the quote. While I didn’t look for Nicholas Murray Butler’s original text, I did find several sources I found credible enough to warrant using it in a blog comment. Specifically, these two:
Edwards Park, a founding editor at Smithsonian Magazine
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/object_1095.html
Historian Arthur Schlesinger
http://bit.ly/lV5tkt
At your snarky request, I have, however, tracked down the original source:
http://www.archive.org/stream/acrossbusyyearsr01butl#page/410/mode/2up
Make sure to start at the top, where Butler adds further weight to my original point about Harding:
“Harding was one of the kindest men who ever lived, but he was without any serious qualifications for the Presidency. He had a good mind, but made little use of it. He had no wide or accurate knowledge of public questions or of the foundations in history, economics and public law on which those questions rest. He was good-natured, lazy and weak when pressure was put on him by a stronger will than his own, which happened to be that of a friend. He would not have consciously done a wrong act in his great office but he had neither the intellect nor the character to prevent himself from being made use of for unworthy purposes by unworthy men who loudly professed their personal and political friendship.”
FWIW: Butler was a Nobel laureate, president of Columbia University, Republican vice presidential candidate and adviser to seven presidents, etc, etc, etc…
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1931/butler-bio.html
Brad, if you would like a training session on search-engine-assisted research, I can be available at a modest fee.
Sincerely,
Dave Maass
Staff writer
San Diego CityBeat
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(Very nice work, Dave! Just one teeny little question: When did Harding say this? — Bradley)
Bradley –
At around 6 p.m. one evening between March 4, 1921 to August 2, 1923.
I’m sure we could narrow it down even further if I had access Butler’s diaries and Harding’s visitation logs. Would Rostra be prepared to fund such a research expedition?
Dave Maass
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(As I expected.. You can’t even tell me the year Harding said this, and try to place the burden of proof on us for your use of the quote. I refer to what KarlFrei said: “As long as we cannot even pin a date on this quote, I do not believe it should be in this encyclopedia.”. You just PWNed yourself. – Bradley)
Rostra will fund it if CityBeat will subsidize it.
A good “when” question might also be, when will the purportedly tech-savvy Bradley figure out how to make his own comments instead of editing other peoples’?
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(I know how to do that just fine. But adding my own comment below another in the same space – which is not editing the comment itself – gives you a reason for commenting here. And SD Rostra would be much poorer without your incisive observations.
— Bradley
Author
To recap, I worded my challenge very carefully to specify a date and time element. Dave, who didn’t read carefully in his premature PWNation, failed to supply it.
Dave supplied the actual text of the reference I had already questioned, because the reference on Wikiquote didn’t include a date. As it turns out, there was no date or even year given in the text.
I can certainly find it plausible that Harding, or any president under the circumstances described in the book, uttered the quote. And the author’s prestige counts in his favor. But plausibility is far from proof. And even prestigious people may have faulty memories. That’s why contemporaneous accounts are so important.
An undated remembered quote:
uttered to just one person,
written 16 years after the fact,
without any contemporary confirmation (such as in a letter),
is far from a confirmed source. It’s a remarkably thin reed for such a startling quote. All the more startling that prestigious writers and historians accept it unquestionably.
Brad:
I was in downtown SD today and browsed through the half-dozen Warren Harding biographies in the Central Library. None of them feature this “famous” quote. Some were written early as the 1930s, others as late as the 1980s. Most are the work of respected scholars.
* Second, the late Nicholas Murray Butler was, in political terms, the Nelson Rockefeller of his time …… along with California Gov. Hiram Johnson, the public face of Liberal Republicanism in America.
The GOP had a virtual Civil War in 1912 (William H. Taft vs. Teddy Roosevelt) leading to Woodrow Wilson’s easy election. By 1920, conservatives were in charge again, and blaming the liberal wing for the 1912 loss.
* In 1920, Dr. Butler was among the GOP presidential hopefuls defeated by Warren Harding at the Republican convention! Naturally he and his side were not fans of Warren Harding from Day One of his presidency as a result.
So a Butler statement disparaging President Harding has the same credibility today that a Mitt Romney critique of John McCain would have , or a criticism of President Obama from a defeated Democratic rival of the 2008 primaries, such as Gov. Bill Richardson.
And by the way, Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler was a fill-in VP candidate after the incumbent VP (James Sherman) died on October 30, 1912, just days before the election. Sherman’s electoral votes were then cast for Dr. Butler as an honor to that gentleman.
Author
Jim, thank you very much for your time!
That Butler was a rival to Harding for the 1920 presidential nomination puts an even more dubious gloss on this quote. And that it’s not found in the Harding biographies you examined is further cause for skepticism.
Finally, there’s the matter of Butler’s age. He was born in 1862. In 1939, when his book was published, Butler was 77. Unless there are contemporaneous records of the quote, I think that’s reason alone to doubt its accuracy.
It’s startling and disturbing that so many people unquestioningly accept the authenticity of this dubious quote.
Dr. Butler was a great teacher … a Nobel Peace Prize winner…
one of the titans of Columbia University. Yet he was passed
over for the presidency by his party so a newspaper publisher
from Ohio could fill the role. He would only be human if he
had found that hard to take.
Brad and Jim’s point is very well taken and, if I had the ability to access the back end, I would indeed update the comment to either include proper attribution or emphasize the point of the historic fiasco of the Harding presidency with another, less contentious zinger from the archives.
SD Rostra would be a far better site if its members held their posts to the same standard they apply to snarky, off-handed comments on the site.
I break the PWN down the middle and offer half to Brad.
Sills, who I congratulate on his ability to read six biographies cover to cover in a day, may have some too if he can source this comment: “Naturally he and his side were not fans of Warren Harding from Day One of his presidency as a result.”
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Point of fact from a reporter who covered the 2008 election from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Obama did not “defeat” Governor Bill Richardson. After the New Hampshire primary, Richardson faced the reality that he wasn’t in the top three and dropped out of the race. He spent the next months capitalizing on the power of his endorsement and ultimately turned “Judas” (James Carville’s word) on his friends, the Clintons, and endorsed and campaigned for Obama. Many speculated Richardson was in consideration for Vice President or Secretary of State, but he was ultimately offered the post of Commerce Secretary. The transition had already begun when it came out that he was involved in a pay-to-play scandal involving state contracts going to big donors to the committees he set up as chairman of the Democratic National Convention. Richardson withdrew from the Commerce post, grew his beard back and decided he no longer thought the death penalty was a good thing.
If Richardson made a statement disparaging Obama, it would certainly lack credibility, but not because they were rivals or because Obama defeated Richardson. No, the statement would be dubious because Richardson squandered his credibility.
That said, if I’m ever captured in North Korea, Columbia, Sudan or Iran, Bill Richardson is on the short list of people I’d want you to send to negotiate for me.
Looks like fact checking 1, Maassive 0.
Thanks for the gracious compromise, Dave. This is an example of how clashing views and egos, suitably restrained after a certain point, can yield useful information. You showed me how to use an Internet resource to get the text of the book. I’ll remember that.
But I think there’s more. The Wikipedia folks were certainly aware of Butler’s book. It’s likely that is the “bad source” KarlFrei referred to. I’m going to look more closely at the Wikipedia discussion for Harding’s page to see if that was the case, and if so, why they called it a bad source.
Well, I just looked, and the bad source was Garrison Keillor. So were the Wikipedians unaware of Butler’s book? That seems highly unlikely. I’ll have to drop a line to them and find out.
Said I “browsed” the Warren Harding biographies, not read them cover to cover.
Gov. Richardson competed with Senator Barack Obama in the Iowa caucuses, and the 2008 New Hampshire primary. Obama got 104,815 New Hampshire votes, while Richardson received 13,269. When you lose by an 8-1 ratio, that is a defeat.
Dr. Butler had the unified support of the entire New York state delegation at the 1920 GOP convention, and had a real chance of winning when the front runners (Wood, Lowden and Hiram Johnson) deadlocked. Harding’s backers outhustled the Butler group, and the Presidency slipped away. That does not make you a fan of the person who beat you.
The Democratic primary is not decided by votes, but by delegates. Following the New Hampshire vote (discounting the superdelegates) Obama had 25 delegates, Clinton had 24, Edwards had 18 and Richardson had jack squat–but there were more than enough delegate left over for the nomination to be anyone’s game. Obama no more defeated Richardson than Clinton defeated Richardson. In fact, the argument can be made that Richardson’s endorsement of Obama contributed greatly to Obama’s ultimate victory.
That may be beside the point: When you lose by a large ratio in an early presidential primary, it is not a defeat. See John McCain’s fourth place showing in the 2008 Iowa Republican caucuses.
Regarding the 1920 convention…Again, Sills, please present a source for your information, either in the form of a link of citation. Butler tells a different version of events regarding the New York delegation:
“As matters progressed, however, it was impossible for my supporters to secure the unanimous vote of the New York delegation because of the insistent demands of those who were urging the name of General Leonard Wood. This of itself was an almost fatal weakness, but in addition the promised Western support, which was always said to be forthcoming, for one reason or another never came. I was not in the least disappointed or surprised at the result.”
While his version may not be accurate, if you’re going to challenge it, you should cite a verifiable source.
http://www.archive.org/stream/acrossbusyyearsr01butl#page/388/mode/2up
“Ballots and Bandwagons” by Ralph G. Martin, the best book ever written about US political conventions. Also covered in Francis Russell’s superb biography of Warren Harding, “The Shadow of Blooming Grove.”
Dr. Butler led Harding on the first few ballots taken (69 to 65 on the 1st ballot for example). Harding dropped down to 59 votes on the 2nd ballot. The GOP convention could well have turned to Butler. It was a near-run thing.
* Thanx to the City Beat Guy for explaining that Bill Richardson losing the New Hampshire primary by an 8-to-1 ratio to U.S. Senator Barack Obama was NOT really a defeat. If only the City Beat Guy had been there to explain that to the former New Mexico governor.
Thank you for the sources, Jim. I look forward to inspecting your research.
I was, indeed, there in the Santa Fe Roundhouse when Richardson announced he was ending his candidacy for President.
At that stage, it was very much unclear whether Clinton or Obama would win the nomination. Even Edwards had a fighting chance. What was certain is that Richardson could no longer finance his campaign, his supporters were asking him to leave the race and it would be embarrassing to continue.
I stand by my point: If Richardson were to say something negative about Obama, the fact that Obama “defeated” Richardson or that they were briefly “rivals” would be neither here not there. (In fact, there were some indications that Richardson’s campaign had struck a pact with Obama during the Iowa caucus.) Richardson went all-in with his endorsement of Obama, sacrificing his political clout and personal friendships with the Clinton wing of the party.
What would be more relevant is that Richardson has a history of doublespeak. What would be more relevant is that Obama passed over Richardson for the vice presidential and secretary of state positions, then Richardson had to give up the commerce secretary position and wasn’t offered a new position when he was cleared in the investigation.
Also, just to be clear, are you retracting the claim that “Dr. Butler had the unified support of the entire New York state delegation” at the 1920 convention?
If not, just for the record:
First Ballot:
http://books.google.com/books?id=-EHR4jGLA14C&pg=PA185&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&sig=ACfU3U1NgMEqoy4T2q9VCmvJUHpjFVpvUg&ci=58%2C107%2C880%2C1032&edge=0
Second Ballot:
http://books.google.com/books?id=-EHR4jGLA14C&pg=PA188&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&sig=ACfU3U1ZF9U9qJPDzEalibaOmt0ldvw5Rw&ci=133%2C106%2C836%2C1051&edge=0
Read a book. Find out how convention tactics sometimes cause candidates to “loan” votes to others to block a front runner and open up the convention to others. Dr. Butler’s managers did this, trying to stop the early leader, General Leonard Wood. They were successful in doing so. It was a sound tactical move.
Author
Jim, Dave,
Let’s not get distracted by minutiae. The salient point is that Butler was a rival to Harding for the 1920 GOP nomination. That counts against Butler’s quote. By itself, it’s not a huge factor. But when you look at the context, the picture looks increasingly unfavorable for relying on Butler.
Of course, Butler might have reconciled with Harding after the election and become a political ally. I’d like to see more about their post-election relationship, especially what Harding had to say about Butler.