Dishonest Abe

From a full page in Look a fortnight ago, Abraham Lincoln's rugged face looked out, seeming to endorse the ten aphorisms printed alongside his picture. Look thought "it's about time for the country to remember" such Lincolnian sayings as "You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift," "You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer," and "You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred."

To Lincoln scholars and plain readers, there was only one thing wrong with Look's snippets of wisdom: Lincoln had never said them. A few were paraphrases of genuine Lincolnisms taken out of context; others were pure invention, and all had been denounced as spurious in the Abraham Lincoln Quarterly. By last week, admitted Editor Gardner ("Mike") Cowles, Look was deluged with a "fantastic" flood of mail from indignant readers who had spotted the alleged Lincolnisms for what they were.

Look had not made up the "quotations." It had borrowed them from the Congressional Record, where they were inserted last January by Republican Congresswoman Frances P. Bolton of Ohio. Mrs. Bolton had gotten them from a friend, who had heard them on a broadcast by Radio Commentator Galen Drake. Drake couldn't remember where he had picked them up. One possibility: the Royle Forum, house organ of a New Jersey machinery manufacturer. (Said Forum Editor Richard Cook, who printed them without checking their authenticity: "One thing consoles me. I am now part of the Lincoln legend, and will live forever.") Cook got them from some direct-mail advertising of another manufacturing concern.

The chain led back at least as far as a 1942 leaflet distributed by the Committee for Constitutional Government, the well-heeled, reactionary Washington lobby backed by New York State Publisher Frank Gannett. In printing what Lincoln hadn't said, nobody had felt the need to print something that he did say. "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."

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