I interrupted my discussion of political plagiarism to pay tribute to William F. Buckley, who died last week. Today I want to resume the subject.
When the charge of “plagiarism” is applied to political rhetoric, I always smile a speechwriter’s smile. Because I sometimes wonder if political rhetoric is anything else.
For example, Abraham Lincoln’s famous 1858 speech, “A house divided against itself cannon stand,” was derived from one of the sayings of Jesus. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus declares: "Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.”
Interestingly, eight years earlier, in a debate over the Compromise of 1850, Sen. Sam Houston had said something quite similar: "A nation divided against itself cannot stand.”
Of course, in the mid-19th Century, Americans knew the Bible much better than they do today, and so they probably recognized that both Lincoln and Houston were appealing to Scripture. Nobody accused either of them of plagiarism at the time.
Nor, to the best of my knowledge, did anyone accuse Franklin Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy of plagiarizing the most famous lines associated with each of them.
FDR’s most famous line, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” goes back at least as far as 1580, to an essay by Michel de Montaigne: “The thing of which I have most fear is fear.” In 1623, Sir Francis Bacon expressed the same idea this way, “Nothing is terrible except fear itself.” And, in 1832, the Duke of Wellington chimed in with, “The only thing I am afraid of is fear.”
Ditto John F. Kennedy’s, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” That one goes back at least as far as 1884, when Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. appealed to an audience to “recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for our country in return.” More than likely, however, JFK had in mind his headmaster at Choate prep school, Rev. George St. John, who was always exhorting students not to ask what their school could do for them, but what they could do for their school.
So is there no such thing as plagiarism in political speech? I wouldn’t go quite that far.
In my opinion, if a politician steals someone else’s original eloquence –- as opposed to an idea or turn of phrase that’s been kicking around in one form or another for years -- and passes it off as his own, that is plagiarism.
In 1987, for example, Sen. Joe Biden plagiarized a speech from British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock, and the slip may well have cost him the Democratic nomination for the presidency. “Why is it,” he asked in a speech he gave in Iowa, “that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go a university? Why is it that my wife . . . is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? . . . Is it because they didn't work hard? My ancestors who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come after 12 hours and play football for four hours? It's because they didn't have a platform on which to stand.”
Neil Kinnock, a descendant of Welsh coal miners, had given the original speech, and Biden changed just a few words. Was this plagiarism? Even Biden tacitly admitted that it was, because on several previous occasions when he used those lines, he had given due credit to Kinnock. It was only on that occasion in Iowa that he quoted the lines without attribution, to his everlasting chagrin.
More recently, in September of 2005, former Vice President Al Gore committed a blatant theft from Winston Churchill. Speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City, Gore warned that Hurricane Katrina was just a sample of the natural disasters that we could expect as the result of global warming. “Katrina,” he intoned, “is the first sip, the first taste, of a bitter cup that will be proffered to us over and over again.”
Speaking on the floor of the House of Commons after Britain’s shameful capitulation to Hitler at Munich in 1938, Churchill had said, “This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year …”
How could Gore have been so brazen –- or so dumb? Surely he must have realized that the “bitter cup” phrase would be the sound bite of the speech, as indeed it was. Did he think his rhetorical pilfering would pass unnoticed?
So let this be a lesson to political speechwriters: Never steal anything that hasn’t been stolen a few times before.
