EducationGovernmentHistory

Tracking Down Bogus History

Sloppy scholarship plays a role in fractured historical accounts as one writer quotes another writer without realizing that the first writer never based his study on original source documents for support of his historical claims. The quotation or referenced event is repeated so often by so many in any number of authoritative sources that it must be true.

Conservatives as well as liberals perpetuate historical myths in order to lend historical credibility to their respective causes. It’s unfortunate that those who are duped by historic myth-telling are the ones who genuinely want to know the truth and are trusting of those who put their views in print. Just because your favorite author has said something is true, it may not be true. He may be innocent of the false attribution, but it is incumbent upon each of us to check a person’s sources. We just saw White House spokesman Jay Carney build a case for the President’s “Jobs Bill” by an appeal to the Bible with a verse that’s not in the Bible.

Conservatives are not immune to bogus attribution. For years Christian writers have attributed the following quotation to James Madison (1751–1836), the fourth president of the United States and educated by Presbyterian clergymen at Princeton (1769–1772), in hopes of supporting the often repeated claim that the Ten Commandments were the foundational law system of the early colonial constitutions, law codes, and Federal Constitution. They were, but the following citation was not made by President Madison:

We have staked the whole future of American Civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of each of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.1

While this is a great statement that can be supported without Madison’s endorsement, no one has been able to locate the original source documentation that would unequivocally tie the statement to him. My investigation led only as far back as the January 1958 issue of Progressive Calvinism where the source of the quotation is a 1958 calendar published by Spiritual Mobilization. What was Spiritual Mobilization’s source for the quotation? None was listed. If you can help track down the original source with documentation, let me know.

There is another possible source for the quotation. Bishop James Madison (1749–1812), a cousin of President Madison, served as president of William and Mary College and was the first Protestant Episcopal bishop of Virginia. It was this James Madison who said, “Good morals can spring only from the bosom of religion.” It would not be difficult to confuse the two Madisons. In fact, in naming what is now James Madison University, “The Daily News-Record columnist wasn’t even convinced that Madison College honored President James Madison. ‘It is claimed by some,’ the columnist wrote, ‘that those who suggested Madison as the new name did not have the president in mind, but Bishop James Madison.’” Even so, there is no tangible evidence that even this James Madison said it.

Then there’s the attribution of the following citation to historian Alexander Fraser Tytler (or Tyler) (1747–1813). An emailer sent me a copy of it yesterday. It reads, and it supports what many believe are important political observations, but is it authentic? Can it be found in the writings of Alexander Tytler? Somebody wrote it. But who?2:

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse [generous gifts] from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

From bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to selfishness;
From selfishness to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.

True enough, but like the dubious James Madison quotation, the Tytler extract is cited on a regular basis and often finds its way into published works, but there is no evidence that he ever said it.3 While there was an Alexander Tytler, there is no extant evidence that puts these words in his mouth or in any of his published works. Supposedly it can be found in a book supposedly written by Tytler that goes by the title The Fall of the Athenian Republic or The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic. There is no such book in circulation or attributed to him. Others claim that the quotation can be located in Tytler’s Elements of General History: Ancient and Modern, a book that does exist.

The following response from the library of the University of Edinburgh states that their research has shown that the quotation does not appear in the library’s holdings of Tytler’s books:

Edinburgh University Library occasionally receives enquiries, particularly from North America, about this particular work. However, this title is not in our Library holdings, nor does it appear in the stocks of the other major research libraries in the United Kingdom. . . . Locally, the chapters of Tytler’s General History . . . (which we DO have) has been checked on the off-chance that The Decline and Fall [of the Athenian Republic] might have been a chapter title . . . but it is not. . . . We have scanned our holdings pretty thoroughly on different occasions, going back a few years now, but we have not found the quotation or anything similar to it, but we cannot absolutely rule out the possibility that we have missed it.

Even the United States Library of Congress has been called in on the search with no success in finding the much cited but elusive quotation.

Even so, the Madison and Tytler quotations continue to circulate as authentic history. Here’s the lesson to be learned: If there are so many who are willing to accept the authenticity of historical citations with something less than a shred of evidence, then it shouldn’t surprise us when students accept historical accounts found in textbooks and scholarly journals that have about the same amount of evidentiary support. It’s one thing to be wrong about a few unsupported quotations; it’s another thing to reshape a school curriculum based on an agenda-driven Leftist worldview.

  1. See, for example, Rousas J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1973), 541; Russ Walton, One Nation under God (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1987), 12; D. James Kennedy and Jerry Newcombe, What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1994), 71; John H. Stormer, Betrayed by the Bench: How Judge-Made Law Has Transformed America’s Constitution, Courts and Culture (Florissant, MO: Liberty Bell Press, 2005), 5; William J. Federer, The Ten Commandments and Their Influence on American Law: A Study in History (St. Louis, MO: Amerisearch, Inc., 2003), and others []
  2. Here‘s a good place to study the topic. []
  3. For example, W. David Stedman and LaVaughn G. Lewis, eds., Our Ageless Constitution (Asheboro, NC: W. David Stedman Associates, 1987), 263. []
Previous post

How Liberals Lie About History

Next post

Corporations Don’t Pay Taxes – Ever!