Cognitive Dissonance

The lines between autobiography and fiction are often permeable. Often a fiction writer's early work is grounded in the writer's own lived experiences. Nick Adams is not Ernest Hemingway, but they shared many of the same experiences. When Nick Adams returns to the Upper Peninsula in Michigan for some fly fishing after the horrors of World War I, the fictional character is following the footsteps of the author. Writers of autobiography, on the other hand, must deal with partial memories. We remember what we want about our past, and we remember some of the things that we would prefer to forget. Whether our pain or our success, we tend to forget certain details and may invent others.

After a Catholic childhood, I became a born again Christian in spring 1980. Over the next several years, my testimony--an account of my conversion--was something I was encouraged to develop as a compelling story and often asked to share in groups. The first real test of my new faith after I made a commitment to follow Jesus is easily recalled. It was only a few days or weeks after my conversion that Mount St. Helens erupted. The resulting ash fall led to many days of cancelled classes. I was in college at Washington State University. I had become something of an expert at drinking game of caps--throwing a beer cap into a glass several feet away--and so there was a lot of peer pressure to perform during the massive amount of drinking that took place in the dorm that week. But, I needed to bring my grades up and was spending my time in study. I resisted the temptations (see "May 18, 1980").

This morning I read an article that I tracked down after it was referenced in a few places. Then I walked my dog. As we walked, my reflections on that article provoked a memory of fall 1980. In Political Science 300 (Constitutional Law) one morning, the woman who sat in front of me turned around to look at someone behind me who was asking the professor a question, saw the political button that I was wearing, and looked at my face with an expression of stern disapproval. It would have hurt less had I not already developed a great deal of respect for her. I assumed from her expression that she despised Ronald Reagan.

I wore this button

How much of this memory is imagined and how much recalled? I do not know where the lines cross from memory to imagination. I know with certainty that I was wearing a campaign button promoting Reagan for President and I remember a look on the woman's face that I read as disapproval. Why she had cause to turn around, however, is less clear in my memory. Maybe I had asked the professor a question. Maybe someone behind or beside me was arguing with the professor. Maybe someone dropped a bottle of water on the floor and it made some noise.

The past few weeks, I have spent a lot of time reflecting on my life in the 1980s. My early support of Reagan before and after my conversion from Catholic to evangelical Protestant led to a great deal of  disillusionment by the end of his administration. In fall 1980, I attended meetings, put up campaign posters, wore political buttons (I had one on my backpack in addition to the one on my shirt). I labored to convince friends that Reagan was a godly man, a Christian who would lead this nation in a direction that was good.

I do not recall what I thought about Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority in 1980, but I'm fairly certain that I did not read the magazine article from 1 February 1981 that I looked at this morning. My home town newspaper carried Parade Magazine and I always read it in high school. But, I did not maintain a subscription in college. Instead, I spent several mornings per week in the periodicals room of Holland Library getting my news by reading Time, Newsweek, and other magazines and newspapers. During this time I started seeking a contrasting balance by reading the National Review on the right and the Nation on the left. Sometimes I tried to read Der Spiegel to get an international perspective and to practice my German.

This morning, I was attempting to check the accuracy of a quote that has appeared several times in my reading the past few days. The source is Marguerite Michaels, "Billy Graham: America Is Not God's Only Kingdom," Parade Magazine (1 February 1981), 6. Only the first page of the article is accessible without getting behind a paywall, but that is enough not only to verify the quote, but also to reveal a tension that caused me considerable cognitive dissonance several years later.

Michaels describes the political priorities of Falwell's Moral Majority as, "pro-family, pro-life, and against the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment], gay rights, pornography, SALT II [Strategic Arms Limitation Talks] and defense cuts." She then quotes Graham, "It would be unfortunate if people got the impression all evangelists belong to that group. The majority do not. I don't wish to be identified with them."

The next paragraph struck a cord with me, quoting Graham, Michaels offers:

I'm for morality. But morality goes beyond sex to human freedom and social justice. We as clergy know so very little to speak out with such authority on the Panama Canal or superiority of armaments. Evangelists can't be closely identified with any particular party of person. We have to stand in the middle in order to preach to all people, right and left. I haven't been faithful to my own advice in the past. I will be in the future.

In the 1960s and 1970s, social justice was central to Catholic teaching. One consistency for me between my Catholic upbringing and my life as an evangelical was a commitment to social justice. In the summer of 1981, I took a bus trip with a group of fellow college evangelicals from San Diego, California to Ensenada, Mexico. Seeing the poverty in Tijuana as we passed through that city provoked tears. Others, seeing the tears, consoled me, empathized with my pain, and engaged me in conversation about causes and consequences of inequality.

Nothing in that trip in 1981 dampened my enthusiasm for President Reagan. But, as the 1980s wore on, I finished college with a degree in history, got married, worked a variety of jobs as I sought full-time teaching work, and eventually returned to school for an MA to make myself more competitive in a difficult job market that favored football coaches as history teachers (I had run cross country in high school).

The more I learned of history and the more I listened to President Reagan and watched the policies he promoted, the less I believed that he and I shared the same Christian conviction that social justice was something one should work towards. In 1984, I voted for Reagan again, but with less enthusiasm than I had in 1980. It was the last time that I voted for a Republican candidate for President. In 1988, I favored Jesse Jackson.

The quote I sought to source: "The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it" (credited to Billy Graham). It appears in the first paragraph of the second column of the article. Here's the whole paragraph:

Billy Graham has talked with Jerry Falwell. "I told him to preach the Gospel. That's our calling. I want to preserve the purity of the Gospel and the freedom of religion in America. I don't want to see religious bigotry in any form. Liberals organized in the '60s, and conservatives certainly have a right to organize in the '80s, but it would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it."
Michaels, "Billy Graham: America Is Not God's Only Kingdom"

Reading Graham's words today, my curiosity is aroused. Surely he understood in 1981 how folks associated with the Moral Majority were using the phrase "religious freedom" to advocate for tax-exempt status for racially segregated Christian schools and colleges. But, the context suggests that Graham had a different notion of religious freedom.

In my view, the 1980s turned the Republican party sharply against policies that favored social justice. That Christians facilitated that shift, or tolerated it, became a growing problem for me. Billy Graham's words strike me today as prophetic.

Hamilton on the Nature of Genius

A Lesson in Sourcing

Many publications credit Alexander Hamilton with a statement that any genius he possesses is rooted in diligent study and a bit of obsession. Genius is "the fruit of labor and thought". This quote caught my interest last night while I was was reading a biography of a well-known twentieth century industrialist.* I went in search of a source, encountering mostly many quote aggregators that proliferate online with no sourcing information, each one simply presenting the same quotes as all the others with different lace surrounding the words.

One such farm, however, claimed to source all the quotes it had aggregated. LibQuotes claims, "278 sourced quotes" (libquotes.com/alexander-hamilton). Most of the sources among those that I checked are eighteenth century letters, essays, or reports authored by Hamilton, or early nineteenth century compilations of the same. But the quote on the nature of genius is sourced to an early twentieth century business education group that called itself the Alexander Hamilton Institute. The institute served to educate, principally through printed texts, business leaders. Their 1919 Modern Business Report List is the source referenced by LibQuotes. It neither is a credible source for the expressions of an eighteenth century political leader, nor the earliest readily available publication with Hamilton's alleged words. The quote appears on the back cover of the pamphlet.

I made a screenshot of the back cover and posted it on Facebook, noting the lack of credible evidence that Hamilton said or wrote it. I awoke to several comments, including several comments from fellow historian and blogger, Larry Cebula. Cebula notes that the quote, "appears nowhere attributed to Hamilton until the early 20th century." 

Following Cebula's comments, I spent some time searching Google Books. The earliest reference turned up so far is The Detroiter (24 January 1916), 5. It appears in a box. Surely the quote was in circulation earlier, but where did it appear?

The Detroiter January 1916

It appeared in many business publications as early as 1916 and into the 1920s, and continued to appear in similar publications up to our day. Tracing it to Hamilton is another matter. More than likely, the quote is fake. But it was fabricated more than a century ago. By whom? For what purpose? The search goes on.



*R. L. Wilson, Ruger & His Guns: A History of the Man, the Company and Their Firearms (1996). The Hamilton quote appears on page 97.

What is Ignorance?

As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.
Josh Billings

I am reflecting on a statement I recall from the Reagan years while watching friends and acquaintances broadcast what they "know" about why Donald Trump should or should not concede that Joe Biden will be the next President. 

Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so.
Ronald Reagan, "A Time for Choosing" 

Reagan's words were deployed against him in the presidential debate with Walter Mondale in October 1984.

Well, I guess I'm reminded a little bit of what Will Rogers once said about Hoover. He said, "It's not what he doesn't know that bothers me, it's what he knows for sure that just ain't so."
Walter Mondale, Presidential Debate

The New York Times attempted to source the quote, determining that it did not emanate from Will Rogers.

More often, the quote gets attributed to Mark Twain, such as in the epigraph to The Big Short (2015), a film about the 2008 financial crisis. The Center for Mark Twain Studies has a short article about it, "The Apocryphal Twain: 'Things we Know that Just Ain't So'". They note Al Gore's frequent attribution of the idea to Twain.

It is a remarkable concept that resonates in our age of misinformation. Garson O'Toole, Quote Investigator has chased down the origins at least twice: "It Is Better to Know Nothing than to Know What Ain’t So" (May 2015) and "It Ain’t What You Don’t Know That Gets You Into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So" (November 2018). In both cases, Josh Billings seems to be the leading candidate for introducing the phrase to American discourse.

In the 2015 article. O'Toole locates the precursor in vol. 11 of An Universal History: From the Earliest Account of Time (1747) by John Swinton and others. He highlights the expression, "it is better to know nothing, than to apprehend we know what we know not." A digital version of the pages of the book is available from the University of Michigan, accessible via HathiTrust.

I offer a screenshot of the relevant paragraph on the right.

How do my friends "know" that Trump should not concede? They do not trust the mass media, which is too liberal. One conservative friend even told me that FOX News is not conservative enough. Where do they get their news, then? 

Certainly there are legal challenges in the courts, some of which were dismissed last week. But, even if they all succeed, will it be enough to turn the election Trump's way? The Wall Street Journal does not appear to think so. See "Election 2020: What are the Trump Legal Claims?" (8 November 2020).

Elections are not final until certified, and the next President is selected when the Electoral College meets in mid-December. In the meantime, every major news outlet has declared former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris the projected President and Vice President. Even after Biden and Harris are inaugurated in January, the divisions in this nation remain deep. Those divisions are fueled by significant disagreement concerning the nature of credible information. How much do we know that is not so?

Most of us can see ignorance in those with whom we disagree, but rarely note it in ourselves. It has been the mission of Patriots and Peoples (clicking on the banner takes you to the home screen--the latest article) from the beginning to look to original sources, to determine their credibility using the methods developed since the nineteenth century for the practice of history. Fact checkers utilize similar methods when evaluating claims by politicians. Mondale and Gore got it wrong when they sourced their quote. 

Crowd Sourcing vs. Expertise

For so long as opinions are counted, not weighed, the better part had often to be overcome by the greater.
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 2

A student paper that I was grading about 2007 put me onto a source that was new to me. The student was making a claim that I had seen in dozens of college papers over the previous two decades, and that was discussed and dismissed in several books on my shelf. The student sourced the claim. I went to the source and found it there. I found other errors in the source.

Within the hour, or perhaps five minutes later, or maybe the next day, I discovered that I could correct the error. The "source" was the Wikipedia entry on the Nez Perce. It repeated a common myth that Chief Joseph was a military genius who led Nez Perce warriors in battle. Lucullus V. McWhorter (1860-1944) addressed this myth in two books that were the culmination of decades of interviews with survivors of the Nez Perce War of 1877, but it was still being pushed in documentaries about the war in the 1970s. Wikipedia also asserted that Nez Perce should have an accent mark. I corrected both errors.

Over the next few days or weeks, I repeatedly corrected these errors. I was quickly joined by a librarian at Washington State University,* where McWhorter's papers are housed in the archives. I had to join Wikipedia as a registered user in order to stop bots from automatically reverting my corrections back to the errors that preceded them. But, even as a registered user, it was a battle to remove the accent mark. Through reason, evidence, and persistence, the librarian and I ultimately won the battle and the Nez Perce entry has offered the correct spelling of Nez Perce for 13 years. The Chief Joseph myth, too, has been largely absent from the entry. Other users made other edits, and the article became a credible encyclopedia entry.

During my first months as a registered user of Wikipedia, I made many contributions. Another battle with other users ensued when I attempted to correct agreement with Ronald Reagan's faulty memory (or lies) about his student days. I did not then have access to the not yet published The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (2014) by Rick Perlstein, but offered some of the work of Lou Cannon refuting Reagan's claims. The battle between Reagan partisans, on the one hand, and partisans for accurate history, on the other, grew so fierce that eventually the entire section was removed from the article. Then, a few years later, Reagan's lie reappeared in the article in another briefer section with a footnote to Cannon's book that refutes the claim.

When students ask about Wikipedia as a source for the past few years, I have told them about the Nez Perce spelling war and the dangers of correcting the memory of a President who died of Alzheimer's. Sometimes they would ask whether I might try to correct the error in the Reagan article again. It should not be too difficult to recover my password, or create a new one. In December 2019, I restored Reagan's "leadership" of student protests his freshman year to his "participation". My previous Wikipedia edits had been in 2014. The truth about Reagan's participation still stands today. How long before a mob tears it down again?

My own memory could be faulty, however, or at least short on details.** A search through my own Wikipedia edits this morning confirms that I added Lou Cannon, Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power (2003) on 12 March 2007, but the context appears to be the narrative about him making up facts during his broadcasts of baseball games, not his false claims about student leadership. I also added Garry Wills, Reagan's America: Innocents at Home (1987) that day, and many other small edits.

For a few months in spring 2007, I made many edits to articles about US history and literature, and to chess, as well as a few other topics. At least once, I was corrected for adding what appeared to be original research. The insights of experts on a topic are welcome only insofar as they accord with general knowledge. Sometimes that will favor error when truth is elusive.

Wikipedia editing proved to be a form of social media with its own network of personal relationships and friendships with people I have never met. In spring 2007, a new chess website came online and I joined that fall. It had active forums that helped pull me away from Wikipedia. For a time, at least, the truth of checkmate offered better grounding for arguments than the evidence of primary sources that counter the memories of a dead president. If I am not mistaken, I also joined Facebook about that time. In fall 2007, I started Patriots and Peoples.


*The Nez Perce talk page shows that she had made edits two years before I joined.
**I may have made a lot of edits while not logged in, and then logged in to try to protect these edits from bots and well-meaning fools.