Plagiarism, or the process of stealing the words of others, reached a new height of public awareness with the 1988 presidential election. That year Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. He was articulate and seemed especially gifted in speech-making. When it was discovered that he had been guilty of borrowing the words of Neil Kinnock, a British Labor Party leader, without attribution, his candidacy was ruined.
No one knows for sure whether Biden purposely planned to take Kinnock's words for his own or whether he was so impressed with Kinnock's approach that he inadvertently slipped them into his own speech.Since then, we have become more aware of the habit of politicians of borrowing words used earlier by other famous people. Although Winston Churchill was praised for coining the descriptive term "Iron Curtain" that descended over Europe in the 1940s, it has been discovered recently that the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels may have used it first.
Abraham Lincoln's reputation is one of the best when it comes to turning a phrase, yet the famous phrase from his Gettysburg address, "That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth" - may have been borrowed. Henry Steele Commager has noted that the Rev. Theodore Parker spoke before an American anti-slavery meeting calling democracy "government over all the people, by all the people, and for the sake of all."
Richard Shenkman recently suggested that John F. Kennedy's most famous sentence, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country" - may have been borrowed from Warren G. Harding, of all people. Speaking in Augusta, Ga., President Harding said that he hoped the people would "think more of what you can do for your government than of what your government can do for you."
In spite of Harding's weak reputation as president, he may have been more eloquent than anyone previously realized. Author Richard Hanser has determined that Harding was probably the first to use the now legendary term "founding fathers." As a senator, Harding delivered an address in Washington to commemorate George Washington's birthday, saying, "It is good to meet and drink at the fountains of wisdom inherited from the founding fathers of the republic."
Yet we have never heaped praise on Harding for giving us a patriotic lexicon. If we purposely quote people we often fracture what they said. William Tecumseh Sherman, the "blood and guts" general of the Civil War, never actually said, "War is hell." Instead, he said, "There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell."
Even Voltaire, who uttered many memorable phrases, apparently never said the one most often associated with him: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
All of this suggests that we may be harder on alleged plagiarists than we have a right to be. If a quotation is fractured or attributed to the wrong person, how can we be sure that a statement was actually stolen?
Parker's statement is certainly similar to Lincoln's, and Churchill used a term said to have been uttered by Goebbels, but do we know that each man consciously lifted it?
All of our thoughts and expressions are influenced by a host of different sources. When we reach a certain state of maturity, we begin to express thoughts that are important to us. Unwittingly, we may borrow phrases or thoughts that we have heard expressed by others, but do not remember who, where, or when. Many of us may be guilty of telling a joke to the very person who originally told it to us.
Even such notable thinkers and writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau uttered statements that were expressed earlier by others. They were eclectic scholars because they organized ideas first enunciated by others into a different format. Emerson was "the great amalgamator."
It is impossible for any person who writes a poem or a song to know for sure that someone else has not already written it. Or that an allegedly original thought has not been expressed elsewhere by someone else. Each of us is the combination of the thoughts and statements passed on to us over a lifetime. Maybe there is no one anywhere who has had a truly original idea.
As someone is bound to have said,"That is a humbling thought."