Real Quotes and Fake Attributes
I’m a sucker for a good ‘motivational’ quote.
If you didn’t know that about me, now you do.
I saw this one at Adelaide Airport on my way back from AHA Conference. Initially I thought it was an advertisement, until I got close enough to read the text. It spoke strongly to me at this time in my life, yet when I saw who it was attributed to, I hesitated.
Henry Ford.
Did I really want to connect to a quote said by one of the most awful men of early twentieth century industry? Yes, I know, bad people can say good things and yadda, yadda, yadda, but where did I draw the line?
Fortunately for my love of a good quote, I’m also a good historian, so I hopped into the internet to find out if Henry Ford really did say these words. They’re attributed to him most places, but if I’ve learned anything about quotes, it’s that by the time someone famous utters them, they’ve often been in the public vernacular for years.
So, was the same true of this message?
I’m very pleased to say: yes!
This quote can be traced back to a much earlier saying regarding kites, which was first recorded in 1846 (although may be much older). The first similar quote featuring an airplane was written in 1920, and the quote as it appears in this image, and has been written ever since, did not appear in print until 1955. Ford died in 1947, and this quote was first attributed to him in 1988. Earlier metaphors about flight, kites and airplanes were common in Ford’s time, but he had been dead eight years before this version took to the skies (I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist), and there’s no evidence he ever coined any of the earlier phrases either – the ideas pre-date him or any of this fellow industrialists.
Who Said That?
There’s a reason some ideas, metaphors and sayings enter the public vernacular and others don’t. It’s because they resonate with a large section of a particular population, often at a time of change or crisis. However, they are very rarely new by the time someone thinks to write them down, or a famous politician uses them in a rousing speech. One of the reasons these speeches are so rousing is because the metaphors – be they positive or negative – are familiar to the audience, and that cultural meaning is reinforced down the generations.
Let’s take Winston Churchill as an example.
There are few politicians supposably as quotable as Mr. Churchill, and even fewer who have given so many famous speeches. However, there have been multiple studies published around Churchill’s love of witty quotations, and there is little evidence he said or coined any of those which have been attributed to him in the modern day. They endure because, when Churchill repeated them, people were seeking comfort at a time of massive upheaval, and the words and ideas were familiar, like a blanket on a cold night. They were also said at a time when fewer ordinary people had access to scholarly literature, or the ability to fact-check, so the first time they heard these common ideas was from the mouth of a politician who they liked and trusted. They therefore became part of the mythology surrounding Churchill, and Britain in the Second World War generally. The same is true of most quotes attributed to particularly famous figures: the quote pre-dates the attribution, but the supposed speaker is so well-known that it is not seriously questioned.
Does It Matter?
Given motivational quotes are everywhere these days, from image caches on the internet to the covers of notebooks and journals, does it really matter if the attribution is wrong, so long as people are connecting with the quote?
I would argue it does.
People have a right to choose what media they consume and what they resonate with. I liked this quote when I first saw it, but I hesitated to share it because it was attributed to a man who was not only an exploitative industrialist, but was also a public admirer of Adolf Hitler, and sold oil and vehicles to General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. I could have lived with a nice quote from an extreme capitalist, but from a fascist? Hell no!
But false attribution can work the other way too, by bolstering a historical figure and shielding them from criticism, usually in tandem with other accomplishments. Both Churchill and Ford are good examples of this. Churchill is often touted as Britain’s ‘greatest Prime Minister’ and he was a very good wartime leader, but, as the British Labor Party made clear in the 1945 general election, it wasn’t a one man government, and it wasn’t a one man war. Churchill was a good orator, and good orators attract a following (just look at Peter Lalor at Eureka), and are usually good at manipulating people around them too. Churchill’s myth, part of which is his quotes, has protected him from being properly examined in popular history. There are many scholarly works, and several excellent biographies, which delve deeper into Churchill’s life, ability and actions and find him seriously wanting, even for a ‘man of his times,’ but it is his quotes which live on in popular imagination. They weren’t really his, but people believe they were, and a man who said such great things must have been a great person, the thinking goes.
In Ford’s case, there is much less public sympathy for him these days, and his pro-fascist ideology has left a bitter taste in the mouth of those who wish to hold him up as a titan of American industry. His personal politics have given his myth as shaky foundation, and general distrust of exploitation and extreme capitalism in the modern world too has left Henry Ford looking very unappealing indeed. He may have been a pioneer of the assembly line, which brought the cost of the automobile down, and allowed more ordinary families to buy these shiny new toys, but that doesn’t excuse his politics in modern eyes. It worked in the later half of the twentieth century, but his image has been (very rightly) tarnished since the 2000s, yet he is still a famous figure, and given the airplane quote has links (albeit very fragile ones) to industry, attributing it to Ford gave both the quote and him some clout.
Final Thoughts
False attribution has been going on for a long time, but many quotes are not often the original work of those they are ascribed to. Quotes are ideas and metaphors which are common among a population; we attribute them to people who said them, even if they were simply expressing common ideas. In the modern world, where so much original work goes unattributed, worrying about who said what 100 years ago may seem petty, but quotes carry deep meanings for many people. We need to know who said them – who really said them, not just the person who put them in a speech – so we can decide for ourselves if we wish to allow them to have meaning in our lives. Falsely attributing them to famous figures, or as part of well-known speeches, strips then of their meaning, and restricts the number of people they can reach.
You can read more about this quote, and others, here: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/03/16/kite/