“Facts are stubborn things…”

In the years leading up to the start of the Revolutionary War in 1775, the rebel-rousing Sons of Liberty used an engraving of what they called “The Boston Massacre” to encourage anti-British sentiments.
 
The engraving, done by Paul Revere, shows a line of British soldiers coldly firing their bayoneted muskets into a crowd of Americans, several of which lay bleeding on the ground.

A poem underneath that scene describes how the King’s men “With murderous Rancour stretch their bloody hands, Like fierce Barbarians grinning o'er their Prey.”

It was good propaganda. But it did distort what happened at the “Boston Massacre” on the night of March 5, 1770.

That night, a local resident got into an argument over a debt with a British soldier. Eight other British soldiers came out on the street to help their comrade. A group of Americans surrounded the soldiers. The Brits were soon being yelled at and pelted with snowballs, ice chunks and debris by the much larger, hostile crowd.

The bloodletting appears to have started when a mulatto seaman named Crispus Attucks hit one of the soldiers with a piece of wood. The soldiers panicked. Somebody yelled “Fire!” and they shot into the crowd, killing Attucks and four other Americans.

When the British soldiers were arrested and put on trial for murder, a Boston merchant asked local lawyer (and future president) John Adams to defend them. He agreed, knowing it would make him unpopular and could ruin his career.

Adams believed the soldiers deserved legal representation as a matter of principle. After looking into the incident, he also believed they were provoked and should not be executed for murder, as many Bostonians wanted.
 
On December 4, 1770, the second day of the brief trial, Adams gave his summation to the jury.

He argued that anyone might have reacted the same way the soldiers did in such a confusing and potentially life-threatening situation. He suggested Crispus Attucks was more to blame for “the dreadful carnage of that night” than the soldiers, because of his “mad behavior.”

“Facts are stubborn things,” Adams said, uttering what became a famous quotation. “And whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence: nor is the law less stable than the fact; if an assault was made to endanger their lives, the law is clear, they had a right to kill in their own defence; if it was not so severe as to endanger their lives, yet if they were assaulted at all, struck and abused by blows of any sort, by snow-balls, oyster-shells, cinders, clubs, or sticks of any kind; this was a provocation, for which the law reduces the offence of killing, down to manslaughter.”

The jury was persuaded. Six of the soldiers were acquitted. Two were found guilty of manslaughter and punished by having their thumbs branded.

Several years later, John Adams wrote in his diary that his defense of those British soldiers was “one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country.”

“Facts are stubborn things” became one of Adams' best known and oft-cited quotes. However, contrary to what I once thought, he didn't coin that line.

As noted by quote mavens Garson O'Toole on his Quote Investigator site and Dr. Mardy Grothe in his Dictionary of Metaphorical Quotations, it was already a saying in England and America and dates back to at least the early 1700s.

Two centuries later, President Ronald Reagan uttered the most famous modern use and perceived “misuse” of that quote.
 
It came in his speech at the Republican National Convention in New Orleans, Louisiana on August 15, 1988.

Reagan was there to speak in support of the current Republican presidential candidate, his Vice President George H.W. Bush, who was running against Democrat Michael Dukakis.

In the speech, Reagan recounted what he viewed as the successes of his administration and the reasons why he felt voters should elect another Republican as president.

Reagan repeated John Adam’s facts quote several times in the address. It was a rhetorical device he used in the part that focused on the economic problems he blamed on his Democratic predecessor, President Jimmy Carter.

“Before we came to Washington,” Reagan said, “Americans had just suffered the two worst back-to-back years of inflation in 60 years. Those are the facts, and as John Adams said, ‘Facts are stubborn things.’ Interest rates had jumped to over 21 percent…Facts are stubborn things…The median family income fell 51/2 percent. Facts are stubborn things.”

Then he made what became one of his most-cited gaffes, saying:

“Fuel costs jumped through the atmosphere, more than doubling. Then people waited in gas lines as well as unemployment lines. Facts are stupid things.”

Reagan immediately corrected himself, adding: “Stubborn things, I should say.” But once the word stupid came out of his mouth, that’s the version that was picked up and cited by his critics.

Today, thousands of websites quote Reagan as saying “Facts are stupid things” as if it were somehow a significant quote — without noting that it came from a speech in which he said “stubborn things” several other times and quickly corrected his brief slip of the tongue.

Of course, thousands of others note that Reagan said “Facts are stubborn things” — without mentioning that he was quoting John Adams, thus creating the impression that Reagan coined the line.

When it comes to quotations on the Internet—and to politics—facts are often slippery things.

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“You have the right to remain silent.”

You probably know the famed “Miranda Rights” warning police are supposed to recite to someone they are arresting.

Even if you’ve never been arrested and heard it spoken by a law enforcement officer in real life, it’s spoken by characters in thousands of TV shows, movies, and books.

The exact language varies from state to state and in fictional uses, but in most cases the key lines are — or are close to — the following:

     “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand the rights I have just read to you?”

Since the late 1960s, those words, especially “You have the right to remain silent,” have become famous. But most people know little about their origin.

The Miranda Rights warning dates back to June 13, 1966, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision on the case Miranda v. Arizona.

That case involved a 22-year-old Arizona man named Ernesto Arturo Miranda.

Miranda had a tough life with a checkered past. By 1966, he had previously been arrested for of a number of crimes, including burglary, vagrancy, armed robbery, being a “peeping Tom,” and car theft. As a teenager, he was sentenced to time in an Arizona “reform school” twice and later spent time in jails in California, Texas, Ohio and Arizona.

In the early 1960s, Miranda was a free man who worked as a laborer at various jobs in Phoenix and generally stayed out of trouble.

Then, on March 2, 1963, an 18-year-old Phoenix woman told police a man had abducted her, driven her into the desert and raped her. Her description of the man’s truck led the police to Miranda. The victim failed to identify him in a line-up. But the police decided to take him into custody and interrogate him. After hours of questioning, Miranda signed a confession. He was soon convicted and sent to jail.

However, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) decided to appeal Miranda’s conviction, after he later claimed he was innocent and that his confession had been coerced. The ACLU focused, among other things, on the fact that Miranda had not been aware of his right under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution not to say anything that would incriminate him. Nor had the police made him aware of that right.

Under the Fifth Amendment, “No person...shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” That’s the part people are referring to when they “take the Fifth” and refuse to testify about something.

Miranda v. Arizona was appealed up to the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices ultimately ruled that Miranda’s rights had indeed been violated. The court’s decision included a section that became the basis for what was soon being called “Miranda Rights.”

The relevant text from the court decision says:

“Prior to any questioning, the person must be warned that he has a right to remain silent, that any statement he does make may be used as evidence against him, and that he has a right to the presence of an attorney, either retained or appointed. The defendant may waive effectuation of these rights, provided the waiver is made voluntarily, knowingly and intelligently. If, however, he indicates in any manner and at any stage of the [384 U.S. 436, 445] process that he wishes to consult with an attorney before speaking there can be no questioning. Likewise, if the individual is alone and indicates in any manner that he does not wish to be interrogated, the police may not question him. The mere fact that he may have answered some questions or volunteered some statements on his own does not deprive him of the right to refrain from answering any further inquiries until he has consulted with an attorney and thereafter consents to be questioned.”

This was boiled down to the lines in the standard Miranda Rights warning spoken to suspects by law enforcement officers. The required wording varies slightly from state to state, but always embodies the basic thrust of the Supreme Court decision.

Unfortunately for Ernesto Miranda, the Supreme Court’s ruling didn’t end his long string of bad luck.

It overturned his initial conviction and set a major legal precedent, but it didn’t actually exonerate him.

The State of Arizona decided to retry Miranda on the rape charge. In the second trial, his confession was not used, but his estranged common law wife testified against him. On March 27, 1967, he was convicted again and sent back to prison.

Although Miranda received a harsh sentence of 20 to 30 years, he was paroled in 1972. Over the next few years, he was arrested several times for mostly minor offences, but he stayed out of serious trouble and became something of a celebrity.

One of the ways he made money in his final years was by selling autographed “Miranda Rights cards” showing the language of the required warning his Supreme Court case had embedded into American law and our language.

In January 1976, Miranda was stabbed to death in the men’s room of a bar in Phoenix, after a dispute over a poker game. A 23-year-old Mexican man who had been there was initially held for the slaying. However, he was not charged due to a lack of evidence and headed back to Mexico.

Among the things found in Ernesto Miranda’s pockets after his death were several autographed Miranda Rights cards.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Another quote linked to June 13 is the famed quip by Baseball Hall of Famer Satchel Paige, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.” You can read the background on that quotation in my post at this link.

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The odd links between “Louie Louie” and Ralph Nader’s “Unsafe At Any Speed”...

It’s truly odd, but true: the renowned rock song “Louie Louie” and the history-making book about car safety by Ralph Nader, titled Unsafe At Any Speed, are connected by both a quote and by a date.

“Louie Louie” was written in 1955 by the pioneering American R&B singer and songwriter Richard Berry (1935-1997).

In a nod to the popularity Calypso music was enjoying in the mid-1950s, Berry gave “Louie Louie” a Caribbean flavor by writing the lyrics in an island-style patois.

It’s basically a love song.

A Jamaican sailor explains to some guy named Louie that he misses his girlfriend. He can’t wait to sail home, take his “fine little girl” in his arms and tell her “I never leave again.” In the chorus he says dolefully: “Louie Louie, me gotta go.” (As in, go home.)

Berry recorded “Louie Louie” with his group the Pharaohs in 1957. Their version was a modest regional hit in the Northwest, where it became a popular party song covered by many local rock bands.

One of those bands was a group of white kids from Portland, Oregon who called themselves The Kingsmen. They made a raucous, poorly-recorded version of the song in 1963.

It was released in May and entered Billboard’s Top 40 singles chart on November 30, 1963.

The fuzziness of the recording and the garbled attempt at Jamaican patois by The Kingsmen’s lead singer, Jack Ely, made the lyrics notoriously hard to understand. Nonetheless, their catchy cover version was a huge hit, selling over a million copies.

By 1964, “Louie Louie” was being gleefully sung by teenagers nationwide, often using salacious Mondegreen variations of the words.

The actual lyrics as written by Berry and slightly altered by Ely are not overtly sexual. But many “dirty” versions were made up and spread.

For example, in the original lyrics the second verse starts with: “Three nights and days we sailed the sea. / Me think of girl constantly.”

In raunchified versions, those words were turned into things like: “Each night at ten, I lay her again / I f--k my girl all kinds of ways.”

It was soon rumored that the hard-to-understand lyrics on The Kingsmen record were themselves obscene. This caused much moral harrumphing by parents, the press, politicians and bureaucrats.

Indiana Governor Matthew Welsh declared the record to be “pornographic” and banned it from the state’s airwaves. (And he was a liberal Democrat!) Some radio stations in other states also banned it.

The FCC and FBI conducted official investigations — at taxpayers’ expense — to try to decipher the muffled words on The Kingsmen’s hit single to determine if it should be banned nationwide.

Federal investigators grilled Richard Berry and Jack Ely and listened intently to the Kingsmen record played forward and backward at various speeds, including 33 rpm, 45 rpm and 78 rpm.

In February 1964, one exasperated FCC official uttered what became a legendary rock history quote when he reported:

       “We found the record to be unintelligible at any speed.”

Around that same time in 1964, lawyer Ralph Nader was working as an advisor to a U.S. Senate subcommittee that was investigating car safety (or, more accurately. the general lack of safety features in cars built at the time).

Armed with the knowledge he gained from that work, Nader wrote a shocking book on the subject. He titled it Unsafe at Any Speed.

It became a bestseller, gave Nader his initial fame as an industry gadfly and led to many improvements in car safety we now take for granted, such as seat belts and anti-lock brakes.

The similarity between Nader’s book title and the FCC official’s quote about “Louie Louie” suggests that Ralph was either aware of the FCC quote — or blissfully unaware that his title was an ironic echo of “unintelligible at any speed.”

What makes the connection even odder is the fact that Unsafe At Any Sped was published on November 30, 1965, exactly two years to the day after The Kingsmen’s recording of “Louie Louie” entered the Billboard Top 40.

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“Say it ain’t so, Joe!”

One of the most famous quotes in sports history is linked to the date September 28, 1920.

On that day, “Shoeless Joe” Jackson supposedly admitted during testimony to a grand jury that he was one of eight Chicago White Sox baseball players who took bribes to let the Cincinnati Reds win the 1919 World Series.

It came to be known as the “Black Sox scandal” and it was devastating for baseball fans.

A crowd of fans were gathered outside the Cook County Courthouse where Jackson was testifying.

Word spread among them that their hero had admitted he’d helped throw the series to the Reds.

According to legend, as Jackson left the courthouse, a heartbroken young boy went up to him and begged: “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”

It’s legend rather than fact because there are holes in key aspects of the story.

For one thing, there’s no court record of Jackson ever admitting he was involved in fixing the game — and, publicly, he always denied it.

In 1921, Jackson was found innocent by a Chicago jury.

In addition, other players who admitted to being on the take said Jackson was not at any of the meetings they had with the gamblers involved.

What about the tear-jerking line by the crushed kid?

Quotation experts have determined the legendary quote is a misquote of a quote that was probably fabricated by a reporter in the first place.  

One of the best overviews of the facts is in Ralph Keyes’ must-have quote debunking book, Nice Guys Finish Seventh: False Phrases, Spurious Sayings, and Familiar Misquotations.

As noted by Keyes, an Associated Press sportswriter named Hugh Fullerton was at the courthouse when Shoeless Joe left it that day.

In the original version of the story he filed, Fullerton wrote that a young kid approached Jackson as he emerged and said: “It ain’t so, Joe, is it?”

Fullerton wrote that Jackson replied “Yes, kid, I’m afraid it is.”

Somehow, by 1940, the words “It ain’t so, Joe, is it?” morphed into “Say it ain’t so, Joe” in rewritten accounts of the incident.

Then it became legend.

Eventually, it became an idiomatic expression used humorously as a comment about some disappointing revelation or bad news.

However, no other eyewitness accounts corroborate either version of the alleged quotation by the young baseball fan.

Jackson himself always denied any such thing was said to him by a kid or anyone else that day.

So, basically, the quote and story were apparently made up by a reporter — and then further distorted in later accounts.

In recent decades, public awareness of the “Black Sox Scandal” and “Shoeless Joe” Jackson has been renewed by various books and movies, most notably by two best-selling books that were adapted into hit movies: Eight Men Out and Field of Dreams.

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The story, the man – and the dog – behind the phrase “man’s best friend”

September 23rd is the anniversary of what is said to be the origin of a dog-related saying that’s as or more famous than “Love me, love my dog.”

The saying is generally heard in the form “A dog is a man’s best friend.”

Sometimes it’s given as “A man’s best friend is his dog.”

Either way, almost everyone knows the phrase “man’s best friend.”

The origin of those familiar words is traditionally credited to the closing arguments made by lawyer George Graham Vest in a trial at the Johnson County Courthouse in Warrensburg, Missouri on September 23, 1870.

The case was about a dog named Old Drum.

Old Drum was an unlucky foxhound who crossed paths with a sheep farmer named Leonidas Hornsby in the fall of 1869.

Hornsby had lost some sheep to dogs and had recently vowed to his neighbors that he’d kill any canine he saw on his land. When Old Drum set paw on Hornsby’s property, the farmer kept his vow.

The next morning, Drum’s owner, Charles Burden, went looking for his missing hound dog.

He found him shot dead and figured he knew who did it. So, he filed a lawsuit against Hornsby, asking for compensation.

George Vest served as Burden’s attorney. In his final summation, Vest brought the jury to tears and won the case with these words:

“The best friend a man has in this world may turn against him and become his enemy. His son or daughter that he has reared with loving care may prove ungrateful. Those who are nearest and dearest to us, those whom we trust with our happiness and our good name, may become traitors to their faith…The people who are prone to fall on their knees to do us honor when success is with us may be the first to throw the stone of malice when failure settles its cloud upon our heads. The one absolutely unselfish friend that a man can have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts him and the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous is his dog.”

The first six words of that paragraph, combined with the last three — “The best friend a man has...is his dog” — is said to be the origin of the dog-lovers’ saying we know today.

It’s likely that “A man’s best friend is his dog” was in use before Vest gave his famous closing arguments in 1870. But the folks who live in the nice little city of Warrensburg, Missouri (population 16,000) have their own opinion.

On September 23, 1958, the 88th anniversary of Vest’s memorable words, a statue of Old Drum was placed with great ceremony in front of the Johnson County Courthouse in Warrensburg, where it can still be seen today.

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“He who destroys a good book kills reason itself.”

In the 1630s, England’s infamous “Star Chamber” (sort of a politically-oriented version of the Spanish Inquisition) banned the printing or sale of “any seditious, scismaticall, or offensive Bookes or Pamphlets.”

The Star Chamber was abolished in 1641.

But two years later, the British House of Commons passed a new censorship law.

Although it was called a book “licensing” law, it was more about limiting free speech and creating publishing monopolies for politically-connected publishers than it was about protecting the rights of authors (or readers).

Books deemed to be in violation of the “Licensing Order of 1643” were seized and destroyed. And, the writers, printers and publishers of those books faced prison sentences.

This angered England’s great poet John Milton and inspired him to write a “speech” urging more liberal publishing laws.

The full title of the printed version was Areopagitica; A Speech of Mr. John Milton For the Liberty of Unlicens’d Printing, To the Parlament of England. (The complete text is online here.)

Now generally referred to as Areopagitica for short, it was first published, in pamphlet form, on November 23, 1644.

Milton’s Areopagitica is among the most famous historical documents advocating freedom of the press ever written. (The title alludes to the ancient Greek judges of Areopagus.)

One line in it is still frequently quoted today and included in many books of quotations:

“As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.”

Milton’s eloquent words failed to persuade Parliament to change its book “licensing” and censorship regulations. They remained in effect until 1694, 20 years after Milton’s death.

Of course, in the centuries since then, censorship of books has significantly and steadily decreased, at least in the United Kingdom, the United States and other Western democracies.

But even in those countries efforts to ban books from public libraries has continued.

For example, during the first decade of the 21st Century, the American Library Association documented more than 4,000 attempts to have various book removed from local libraries here in the US.

Some modern self-appointed censors want to ban books that conflict with their religious or political views. Some want to block access to books they deem “pornographic.”

Other reasons given for requesting books to be banned from American libraries in recent years include things like sexism, “anti-family” content and uses of the N-word, one of the common complaints lodged against Mark Twain’s classic novel Huckleberry Finn.

In fact, the targets of people and groups who want to ban books at their local libraries include many major literary classics, such as: 

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
1984 by George Orwell
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
The Call of the Wild by Jack London

You can read a longer list of examples on the “Banned & Challenged Classics” page of the ALA’s website.

If John Milton were still around to see that list, I’m pretty sure it he be angered again.

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“No rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

On March 6, 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court issued it’s controversial decision on Scott v. Sandford — generally referred to as “the Dred Scott case.”

The plaintiff, Dred Scott, was a slave purchased from the Blow family of St. Louis in 1831 by U.S. Army surgeon John Emerson.

Over the next 12 years, Emerson took Scott with him to various places where he was assigned. When Emerson died in 1843, Scott tried to purchase his freedom from the doctor’s widow, Irene. She denied his request.

So, in 1846, Scott sued for his freedom on the grounds that Dr. Emerson had previously taken him to Illinois, where slavery was prohibited by state law, and to the Wisconsin Territory, where federal law prohibited slavery as part of the “Missouri Compromise” in 1820.

Scott lost in his first trial, then won in a second — only to have that decision overturned by the Missouri State Supreme Court. In 1854, with the help of local abolitionists, Scott filed suit in Federal Court against John Sanford, Mrs. Emerson's brother and executor of the Emerson estate.

When that case was decided in favor of Sanford, Scott and his allies appealed it to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The infamous, oft-quoted conclusion of the Supreme Court’s decision, written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, was that current or former slaves and their descendants had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

Taney wrote in the majority decision:

“In the opinion of the court, the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show, that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument...They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit."

The Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott case was among the most consequential in American history and key aspects of it are ironic in hindsight.

One irony is that the decision was not just a blow against the rights of blacks. It was also a blow to states rights, a principle often espoused by Southern states to justify slavery and oppose federal civil rights laws.

In the Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court concluded that, under the U.S. Constitution, states had no right prohibit slavery. Many people on both sides of the slavery debate had hoped the Court’s decision would resolve the issue. Instead, it had the opposite effect. It made that issue hotter than ever and helped propel the country into a civil war that turned the temporary legal win of slaveholders into a final defeat.

The grave implications of the Dred Scott decision were clear to Abraham Lincoln. They were the main focus of his famous “House Divided” speech on June 16, 1858, at the Illinois Republican convention in Springfield, Illinois.

In that speech, Lincoln warned that the Court’s decision took away the rights of states to make their own decisions and would eventually force the legalization of slavery throughout the country.

“What Dred Scott's master might lawfully do with Dred Scott, in the free State of Illinois,” Lincoln said, “every other master may lawfully do with any other one, or one thousand slaves, in Illinois, or in any other free State.”

Using a quote from the Bible, Lincoln also made a famous, correct prediction:

“‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new, North as well as South.”

After the South lost the Civil War, the Dred Scott decision was nullified by the Thirteenth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which officially prohibited slavery nationwide and granted citizenship to former slaves. Dred Scott didn’t live to see those great legal victories. However, he did enjoy a brief period of freedom.

Shortly after the Supreme Court’s decision in 1857, Irene Emerson’s second husband convinced her to return ownership of Scott to the Blow family in St. Louis.

The head of the family at that time was Missouri Congressman Henry Taylor Blow, a strong opponent of slavery.

On May 26, 1857, Blow gave Scott his freedom — which was allowed under Missouri law despite the Supreme Court’s ruling that states could not prohibit slavery.

Once freed, Scott got a job working as a hotel porter in St. Louis.

A little over a year later, on September 17, 1858, he died from tuberculosis.

Today, his body lies in a grave in the Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis. For many years, it has been a local tradition to place Lincoln pennies on his headstone. Often, the pennies overflow and fall next to the commemorative marker on the ground, which says:

IN MEMORY OF A SIMPLE MAN
WHO WANTED TO BE FREE
DRED SCOTT

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