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This must be a black thing, plagiarism.

Or, rather, it would be embarrassing, if King’s plagiarism of
his Ph.D thesis hadn’t been systematically covered up so that
few know about it. In fact, King did not plagiarize the quote by
Theodore Parker that was falsely attributed to him by Obama’s
rug. But King’s word for word stealing of massive parts of his
Ph.D thesis forever taints his reputation. What kind of person
would do something like that?

On third thought, it is very embarrassing. As we see from the
photo, the new carpet, with its outer border of pithy liberal
statements, most of them by U.S. presidents, dominates the Oval
Office. Now that the misattributed quotation has been
discovered, what is Obama going to do? Have the carpet redone,
with Martin Luther King’s name replaced by Theodore Parker’s?
But that would spoil what is undoubtedly the carpet’s main
appeal for Obama, that it memorializes King and puts him on the
same level with several presidents. Or leave the carpet as is,
with the false attribution intact, thus serving as a permanent
reminder that the main hero of black and liberal/neocon America
was a serious plagiarist?

The September 4 Washington Post reports:

Oval Office rug gets history wrong

By Jamie Stiehm [What a stupid name for an adult human being. Is
this Jamie male, female, who knows?]

A mistake has been made in the Oval Office makeover that goes
beyond the beige.

President Obama’s new presidential rug seemed beyond reproach,
with quotations from Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt,
Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther
King Jr. woven along its curved edge.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward
justice.” According media reports, this quote keeping Obama
company on his wheat-colored carpet is from King.

Except it’s not a King quote. The words belong to a long-gone
Bostonian champion of social progress. His roots in the republic
ran so deep that his grandfather commanded the Minutemen at the
Battle of Lexington.

For the record, Theodore Parker is your man, President Obama.
Unless you’re fascinated by antebellum American reformers, you
may not know of the lyrically gifted Parker, an abolitionist,
Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist thinker who foresaw the
end of slavery, though he did not live to see emancipation. He
died at age 49 in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War.

A century later, during the civil rights movement, King, an
admirer of Parker, quoted the Bostonian’s lofty prophecy during
marches and speeches. Often he’d ask in a refrain, “How long?
Not long.” He would finish in a flourish: “Not long, because the
arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

King made no secret of the author of this idea. As a Baptist
preacher on the front lines of racial justice, he regarded
Parker, a religious leader, as a kindred spirit.

Yet somehow a mistake was made and magnified in our culture to
the point that a New England antebellum abolitionist’s words
have been enshrined in the Oval Office while attributed to a
major 20th-century figure. That is a shame, because the slain
civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate was so
eloquent in his own right. Obama, who is known for his
rhetorical skills, is likely to feel the slight to King—and
Parker.

My investigation into this error led me to David Remnick’s
biography of Obama, “The Bridge,” published this year. Early in
the narrative, Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, presents
this as “Barack Obama’s favorite quotation.” It appears that
neither Remnick nor Obama has traced the language to its true
source.

Parker said in 1853: “I do not pretend to understand the moral
universe; the arc is a long one…. But from what I see I am sure
it bends toward justice.”

The president is at minimum well-served by Parker’s presence in
the room. Parker embodied the early 19th-century reformer’s
passionate zeal for taking on several social causes at once.
Many of these reformers were Unitarians or Quakers; some were Transcendentalists. Most courageously, as early as the 1830s,
they opposed the laws on slavery and eventually harbored
fugitives in the Underground Railroad network of safe houses.
Without 30 years of a movement agitating and petitioning for
slave emancipation, Lincoln could not have ended slavery with
the stroke of a pen in the midst of war. Parker was in the
vanguard that laid the social and intellectual groundwork.

The familiar quote from Lincoln woven into Obama’s rug is
“government of the people, by the people and for the people,”
the well-known utterance from the close of his Gettysburg
Address in 1863.

Funny that in 1850, Parker wrote, “A democracy—that is a
government of all the people, by all the people, for all the
people.”

Theodore Parker, Oval Office wordmeister for the ages.

Jamie Stiehm, a journalist, is writing a book on the life of
Lucretia Mott, a 19th-century abolitionist and women’s rights
leader. [I suppose we can assume that this Jamie is a female.]

- end of initial entry -
Keith J. writes from England:

Imagine if Jamie Stiehm had attributed the statement—“Government
of the people, by the people and for the people”—not to Lincoln,
not to Theodore Parker, but to its actual originator, at least
in English, John Wycliffe (d. 1384 AD).

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/017242.html


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