John Quincy Adams Quotes

AFA Uses Barton's Fake John Quincy Adams Quote to Support Theocracy

You know you wanted it: more historical revisionism from the world of Christofascism. The American Family Association is infected with David Bartonism. The AFA is currently promoting a series of lectures called “ Biblical Foundations of Government with Erich Pratt .” Pratt happens to be a graduate of Pat Robertson’s Regent University, which ought to ve enough to damn Regent University for all time in the eyes of academia. He is also, no surprise, a conservative activist.

As Right Wing Watch tells us,

Not so much, as we’ve shown here before, but that’s not really the issue here. What is more of concern is the use of one of Barton’s infamous “Founders” quotes – quotes that he has himself made up through either gratuitous ignorance or gratuitous dishonesty.

AFA has a one minute trailer for the Biblical Foundations series. This contains what purports to be a quote from John Quincy Adams ,

The fly in the buttermilk is that this is not a quote from John Quincy Adams. He never said this. He never said anything close to this.

Where then does it come from you might ask. I will tell you. It comes from David Barton, from his America’s Godly Heritage series , a veritable treasure-trove of falsehoods.

Ed Brayton at Scienceblogs has written that “the quote, to be blunt, is a fake” and there is no other way to say it.

The problem for the AFA and for Barton (and obviously for Federer) is that this is not a quotation from John Quincy Adams. It is lacking quotation marks, which Thornton is careful to use, and it lacks a footnote giving a source, which Thornton was also careful to use.

You can search all you want but you won’t find anything in Adams’ writing like this.

You have to be careful with quotes; you never know where they might have come from. I once read a book about the Dakota War of 1862 on the Minnesota frontier. It attributed a quote to a Union captain and cited another book as a source. I tracked down this other book and it turned out that author had simply invented these words to be put into the mouth of that captain. To simply have quoted the quote without checking would have been to repeat and compound the originally error of a not very scholarly author. Barton is supposed to be an “expert” on these matters. He clearly is not. The fraud is rendered more blatant still by the simple expedient of appealing to Wikipedia . Full of errors it may be but it even gets the quote right, calling it a quote “about” Adams.

John Quincy Adams, a public life, a private life

Writings of John Quincy, Adams

The Stranger and the Statesman, James Smithson, John Quincy Adams, and the Making of America's Greatest Museum: The Smithsonian

The papers of the Johnson family of Connecticut

The character of Hamlet