The Pastor Weems story of the Cherry Tree attributed to President Washington the adage that he could not tell a lie. But in the past year or so, there have been two different TV commercials in which a character dressed as President Lincoln is portrayed as the truth-telling president. (Geico Insurance, and some other advertiser that has an explicable non-sequitur chase scene on a train, also involving Franklin.)
Googling /(name of president) “cannot tell a lie”/ produces 677,000 hits when Washington’s name is entered, but 249,000 inserting Lincoln’s name in the search terms.
So how did it happen that an attribute of one president has so widely become associated with another one?
The phrase “I cannot tell a lie” is one I associate with Washington and, specifically, the apocryphal cherry tree story (which young Lincoln himself was familiar with, IIRC). The attribute of scrupulous honesty is one I associate with Lincoln.
As mentioned in the article linked by puddleglum, Lincoln is associated with the story about walking miles to return incorrect change. Since my mother frequently used this story in admonishing us to make good if a clerk made a mistake in our favor, it was the first thing I thought of when I saw the thread title.
Because they’re the two non-modern presidents everyone knows, the wrong one is known as “Honest Abe,” and seeing as the story is apocryphal at best, it doesn’t really matter to most people which one it was, at least not enough that it’s important to remember.
Of course neither president hesitated to lie or at least be deceitful if he perceived it necessary to the public good. Washington put great store in spying and intelligence gathering skullduggery, and famously attacked the morning after Christmas. Lincoln once said he would hold any position that brought reunion, but hold it only so long as he thought it would work, and discard it as soon as it did not.
The difference between these men and other presidents is not that they never lied, but that the American public by and large has come to believe they practiced deception only when necessary for the public good, and never for personal gain.
By that measure, Lincoln is five times the president Washington ever was.
A huge portion of those hits aren’t saying that the quote is about Lincoln, but rather retelling the Weems story about Washington and then talking about Lincoln.
Wasn’t there an episode of Bewitched where George Washington was upset that Lincoln was on a bigger bill until Samantha pointed out that it meant more people would see his picture than Lincoln’s?
In Washington’s day, spying, even what we’d consider mere scouting, was considered dishonorable and ungentlemanly. And Lincoln’s pragmatic flexibility could certainly be called deceptive by his opponents–and frequently was.
Understand that I hold both men in the highest regard and mean no insult to their memory.
