Several variations of this quote have been attributed to Abraham Lincoln, but Snope calls it fake news. However, I have seen several other websites debate its historicity and they’re not as sure as Snopes that it was faked.
In my own searches, I found at least three citations that pre-date the disputed one in Snopes:
First, Snopes did not call it “fake news”. That’s a term that’s only become popular in the past couple of years, and many people and websites, including Snopes, would never use it. It has nothing to do with news sources at all. People who use the term “fake news” are mashing together several ways wrong statements are made. No news sources are writing articles about that quotation. It’s a misattributed quotation, not an incorrect news story.
Second, several phrases in the supposed Lincoln quotation don’t sound like they come from the 1860’s. They sound like they come from the 1890’s or the 1930’s (although it’s known to be from earlier than the 1930’s). “Corporations have been enthroned” and “money power” are terms that were more common in those later decades, not during the Civil War. The whole quotation is about class struggle, and that’s not how Lincoln talked about things.
Third, no one has found a letter or a speech by Lincoln that includes that quotation. This doesn’t absolutely prove that Lincoln didn’t say such a thing. This just shows that it’s not typical of what Lincoln wrote and that no one has found it in his speeches and letters. It sounds like someone from the 1890’s making up a quotation from Lincoln to buttress their arguments. In any case, what’s the point of absolutely disproving that Lincoln said it? The quotation should be looked at as a simple statement about the economic status of the U.S. Is it true or false? That has nothing to do with who said it.
Regarding the linguistic differences of the 1860s vs latter periods… that’s wonderful input, thank you. Is that something you just happened to know, or is there some standard way to measure/guesstimate the date of a passage by its language use?
As for whether it’s “fake news” and why it would matter at all, well, it doesn’t really… it would just be an interesting tidbit about our history. My college history professor actually used the disputed cite to present this quote as truth. That seemed too prescient a thing for Lincoln to have said, so I tried to find more context around the quote. As it turns out, it’s been making the rounds as an occasional meme in support of socialism, and often denounced with equal fervor by conservatives who point out it’s fraudulent. Lincoln is one of those rare historical figures still mostly admired by people across the political spectrum, so anything he says (or is reported to have said) gives undue weight. A fake thing said by a powerful person has a power all its own. Truthiness has nothing to do with believability. Guess how we know that…
At the end of the day, it’s just an internet curiosity that I thought would be worth examining. There is a camp firmly believing that Lincoln was a radical revolutionary censored and whitewashed by later historians. There’s another camp who think quotes like the above are liberal revisionism attempting to rewrite Lincoln.
It is important to know, also, that there was no primary evidence of this. Is it usually the case that his other speeches and writings are recorded somewhere and easily found, or would this be an unreasonable standard of proof to require of something from the 1860s?
Here’s an interesting graph… “money power”, “aggregate wealth”, and “corporate power” saw relatively flat use through the 1800s and then peaked in the late 1890s and early 1900s, as you said: Google Ngram Viewer
It’s absurd to attribute it to Lincoln, anyway. Yes, he wrote and spoke a lot about a crisis that was tearing the country apart… but it’s rather a different crisis that he was talking about, and it kind of demanded his full attention.
I don’t think there were any corporations in existence at Lincoln’s time. Firms like Trusts may have been around, but not multi-stockholder businesses as we know them today.
That was my immediate reaction on reading the quote. It just doesn’t sound like something that anyone, let alone Lincoln, would say in the 1860s (well, maybe Karl Marx).
And by the early 1860s, there were many corporations around: railroads, canals, steel manufacturers, banks, etc. Not all of those were organized as LLCs, but many were.
I’ve heard that too, but couldn’t find a primary source. Do you know of one?
(Our current class project is to discuss Lincoln’s views on capitalism. This quote is a cornerstone of it, which is why its veracity would be interesting to discuss in context.)
Sorry if I didn’t make this clear enough originally, but this whole thing was that I didn’t realize Lincoln’s views were disputed (my own ignorance). Something like an “Lincoln Encyclopedia” published 50 years ago would’ve seemed perfectly authoritative to me as a layman, but clearly isn’t. How do you tease apart the legitimate ones from the hoaxes?
You say that this question arises because of a class project. You should tell the class that this quotation comes from one book written 68 years ago that quotes from one book written 87 years ago. You should point out all the reasons that we’ve given in this thread why it’s not plausible that Lincoln said any such thing. Then you can perhaps point out that there’s a two-volume edition of Lincoln’s writings published just a few years ago (that can be easily ordered online) that someone who thinks that Lincoln said this quotation can read for themselves to discover what Lincoln’s known writings were like. If someone still insists that the quotation is real, you can say that what Lincoln supposedly said in one dubious quotation ultimately proves nothing about the truth of the ideas in the quotation. Note that I’m talking about the truth of the ideas now, not the source of the ideas. The fact that Lincoln did or didn’t say something about these ideas doesn’t prove that the ideas are true. It’s still worthwhile talking about whether the ideas are correct. It’s not worthwhile anymore talking about the source of the quotation.
