PART IV: AMERICAN VERBIAGE
1 Sir James George Frazer, Psyche’s Task: A Discourse Concerning the Influence of Superstition on the Growth of Institutions (1913; repr. London: Macmillan, 1920), 169.
Chapter 23 • Argument by Idiom
2 William Davie to James Iredell, January 22, 1788, in Life and Correspondence of James Iredell… , ed. Griffith J. McRee, vol. 2 (New York: D. Appleton, 1858), 217.
3 “Comte de Moustier, Description of the Inauguration,” in Documentary History First Federal Congress, vol. 15, Correspondence: First Session, March–May 1789, ed. Charlene Bangs Bickford, Kenneth R. Bowling, Helen E. Veit, and William C. diGiacomantonio (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2004), 403–6, at 404. See also Lengel, Inventing George Washington, 103.
4 Tobias Lear, April 30, 1789, diary entry, in The Writings of George Washington, ed. Jared Spark, vol. 10 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1847), 463 (emph. in orig.).
5 William Maclay, April 30, 1789, diary entry, in Journal of William Maclay, ed. Edgar S. Maclay (New York: D. Appleton, 1890), 9.
6 Senate Journal, 1st Congress, 1st Sess., April 30, 1789, 18.
7 Cathy Lynn Grossman, “No Proof Washington Said ‘So Help Me God’–Will Obama?,” USA Today, January 7, 2009.
8 Ibid.
9 Peter R. Henriques, “‘So Help Me God’: A George Washington Myth that Should Be Discarded,” History News Network, January 11, 2009.
10 Lengel, Inventing George Washington, 105.
11 William Maclay, April 30, 1789, diary entry, 7.
12 George Washington, Rules of Civility: The 110 Precepts That Guided Our First President in War and Peace, ed. Richard Brookhiser (New York: Free Press, 1997), 78.
13 House Journal, 1st Congress, 1st Sess., April 27, 1789, 21.
14 Senate Journal, 1st Congress, 1st Sess., May 5, 1789, 22.
15 Rufus Griswold, The Republican Court; or, American Society in the Days of Washington (New York: D. Appleton, 1856), 141.
16 Ibid., 142.
17 Lengel, Inventing George Washington, 105.
18 Arthur did not take the oath in the way familiar to modern readers, repeating the oath, clause for clause. Instead, the chief justice read the oath and Arthur replied, “I will, so help me God.” See “The New Administration,” New York Times, September 23, 1881, 5.
19 The most thorough report of the private March 4, 1917, oath is detailed enough that it mentions the words of the bible and the chapter and verse where Wilson’s thumb lay when taking the oath. Wilson did not add “so help me God,” according to this report. “Wilson Is Sworn in for Second Time at Simple Ceremony,” Washington Times, March 4, 1917, Sunday Evening ed., 1 and 5, https://perma.cc/9J9D-DBX8; https://perma.cc/MHX6-GT3L. “Following administering of the oath, the Bible, the property of President Wilson, was taken to one side of the room by Chief Clerk Maher and opened at the fly leaf for the signature of the President and the Chief Justice. On the fly leaf was written, with colored ink, in old English script, the oath administered today. At the bottom of the oath President Wilson affixed his signature.” Ibid at 5. I obtained a scan of the flyleaf of Wilson’s inaugural bible from the LOC and the oath ends where the Constitution dictates; “so help me God” does not appear. Further evidence that Wilson didn’t say it. Two other descriptions of the private oath, from his wife and his chief clerk, agree that Wilson did not add “so help me God.” See Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, My Memoir (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1939), 130; Thomas W. Brahany, March 4, 1917, diary entry, in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson Digital Edition (Charlottesville, VA: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2017). Conversely, several sources say that Wilson added “so help me God” to the public oath on March 5. See, e.g., Second Inauguration of Woodrow Wilson… , March 5, 1917 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918), 41.
20 There have been far more presidential oaths than presidents. Through Donald Trump’s 2017 oath, presidents took the oath 75 times. Circumstances forced some to do so in private ceremonies—Arthur, Teddy Roosevelt, Coolidge, and more. Others did so in private Sunday ceremonies that were repeated later in public—Wilson, Eisenhower, Reagan, and Obama. Still others took multiple oaths to erase any doubt or question as to the validity of the initial oaths—Coolidge, Obama. Of the first 40 presidential oaths in US history (1789 through March 4, 1917), only Arthur’s 1881 and Taft’s 1909 public inaugurations featured the words “so help me God.” There is conflicting evidence about Taft’s oath. Two newspapers report that the words were added: “Now in Office,” Washington Herald, March 5, 1909, https://perma.cc/T2E5-9X3U; “Oath Administered by Aged Jurist,” Washington Times, March 4, 1909, late ed., 2, https://perma.cc/5XL7-DMPC. However, the oath recorded in Taft’s bible and signed by both the president and chief justice does not include the words. See Presidential Inaugural Bibles: Catalog of an Exhibition: November 17, 1968 through February 23, 1969 (Washington, DC: Washington Cathedral, 1969), 38.
21 Hoover’s 1929 inauguration is the exception. Coolidge himself did not say the words in 1925, but did respond “I do” to Chief Justice Taft’s prompting, and Taft did use the words: “Chief Justice Taft…administered the oath, as follows: ‘Calvin Coolidge, do you solemnly swear…protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help you God?’ The President bowed his head. ‘I do,’ he replied in a voice that was barely audible.” New York Times, March 5, 1925, 3.
22 John Milton Cooper Jr., “Politics and Wilson’s Academic Career,” in The Educational Legacy of Woodrow Wilson: From College to Nation, ed. James Axtell (Charlottesville, VA: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2012); see also Niels Aage Thorsen, The Political Thought of Woodrow Wilson, 1875–1910 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988), 142.
23 Woodrow Wilson, George Washington (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1903), 269–70.
24 Germany resumed unrestricted U-boat warfare on January 31, 1917; the US ended diplomatic relations with Germany on February 3, 1917.
25 The Zimmerman telegram came to light March 1, 1917, and was confirmed March 3.
26 See, e.g., Frederick S. Lane, The Court and the Cross: The Religious Right’s Crusade to Reshape the Supreme Court (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008), 25–47; Sarah Palin, interview by Bill O’Reilly, May 7, 2010, The O’Reilly Factor, Fox News, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,592422,00.html; Kennedy and Newcombe, What If America Were a Christian Nation Again?, 3; F. LaGard Smith, The Daily Bible Devotional: A One-Year Journey through God’s Word in Chronological Order (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2008), 235; Rev. Dwayne Byerly, Today’s Democrats & Christianity (Rev. Dwayne Byerly, 2008), 58-9; Christian Smith, Christian America?: What Evangelicals Really Want (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2002), 21–60 (explaining a survey of evangelicals and their beliefs); John J. DiIulio, Godly Republic: A Centrist Blueprint for America’s Faith-Based Future (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2007), 1–3 (explaining but not making the claim); William Henard, “America: Essentially Christian,” in Christian America?: Perspectives on Our Religious Heritage, ed. Daryl C. Cornett (Nashville, TN: B&H, 2011), 168, quoting Rep. Randy Forbes’s May 6, 2009 speech in the House to support his “American Spiritual Heritage Week resolution”; Paramount-Richards Theatres v. City of Hattiesburg, 210 Miss. 271, 278 (1950).
27 Geoffrey Stone, “The Story of the Sedition Act of 1798: ‘The Reign of Witches,’” in First Amendment Stories, ed. Richard Garnett & Andrew Koppelman (New York: Foundation Press, 2012), 13–38.
28 At press time, the investigations into President Donald Trump, his family, his campaign, and his businesses, tied to Russian election meddling and possible collusion, remain incomplete.
Chapter 24 • “In God We Trust”: The Belligerent Motto
1 Robert Ingersoll, interview by Secular Review, London, 1884, in Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, ed. C. P. Farrell, vol. 8, 186.
2 Mark Twain, “Education and Citizenship,” May 14, 1908, speech, in Mark Twain’s Speeches (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1910), 147–48.
3 I owe Mike N
ewdow for his work uncovering the religious purpose behind the addition of “In God We Trust” to our coinage. Much of the history and citations contained herein were his work.
4 J. David Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History 57, no. 4 (2011): 30748. https://muse.jhu.edu/. Hacker’s estimate is higher than the previously accepted 620,000 and accounts for about 2.4 percent of the country’s population of 31 million. Applied to roughly an American population of 327,000,000 in 2019 yields 7,848,000 dead. The lower figure, 620,000, would be about 6.5 million dead in 2019.
5 Walt Whitman, Memoranda during the War, “The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up,” in The Complete Prose Works (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1892), 79–80 (emph. in orig.), http://www.whitmanarchive.org/published/other/CompleteProse.html#leaf043r1. A special thanks to Ric Burns and PBS for bringing this haunting piece to my attention in Burns’s Death and the Civil War on PBS’s American Experience.
6 As Paul Finkleman pointed out to me, the Haitian Revolution may be the exception to this statement. Though perhaps there is a distinction to be made between slaves revolting and the nonslave class warring against itself.
7 Wood Gray, The Hidden Civil War: The Story of the Copperheads (New York: Viking, 1942), 115.
8 Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln Papers, ser. 3, Gen. Correspondence, 1837–1897, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865, endorsed by Lincoln, https://www.loc.gov/item/mal4361300/. See also Mark Noll, “‘Both…Pray to the Same God’: The Singularity of Lincoln’s Faith in the Era of the Civil War,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Assoc. 18, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 1–26, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.2629860.0018.103.
9 William Lloyd Garrison, remarks at the fifth national woman’s rights conference, Philadelphia, October 18, 1854, in History of Woman Suffrage, ed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, vol. 1, 1848–1861 (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1889), 382–83.
10 David Goldfield, America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 1. Special thanks to NPR’s ongoing series with librarian Nancy Pearl, who recommended this book.
11 Ibid., 3.
12 Quoted in John Dean, Conservatives without Conscience (New York: Viking, 2006), xxxiv.
13 Ibid., 5.
14 David Goldfield, “Evangelicals, Republicans and the Civil War,” New York Times, July 7, 2011.
15 Goldfield, America Aflame, 37, citing Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics: Antebellum America (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1993), 137.
16 Austin Willey, The History of the Antislavery Cause in State and Nation (Portland, ME: Brown Thurston, 1886), 260.
17 Goldfield, America Aflame, 125.
18 As quoted in Congressional Globe, 31st Congress, 1st Sess. (March 4, 1850), 477.
19 Ibid.; Goldfield, America Aflame, 65–66.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 4–5.
22 Joint Resolution #4 to Establish a Seal for the Confederate States, approved by the 1st Congress of the Confederated States, Sess. 3, April 30, 1863, in The Statutes at Large of the Confederate States of America…ed. James M. Smith (Richmond, VA: R. M. Smith, 1863). For various translations, and there are more, including “an assenter, a defender, protector, deliverer, liberator, a mediator, and a ruler or guardian,” and “avenger or punisher”; see the speech by CSA senator Thomas Jenkins Semmes of Louisiana describing the phrase in detail in “Seal of the Southern Historical Society and the Great Seal of the Confederate States of America,” Southern Historical Society Papers, vol. 16, ed. R. A. Brock (Richmond, VA: Southern Historical Society, 1888), 416–22, at 419–22. See a lithograph of the original engraving of the seal at https://lccn.loc.gov/2014645208.
23 Ibid., Southern Historical Society Papers, vol. 16, 420.
24 Goldfield, America Aflame, 8.
25 James D. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Confederacy Including the Diplomatic Correspondence 1861–1865 (Nashville, TN: United States Publishing, 1905), 37, https://bit.ly/1t5FwVc.
26 Mason I. Lowance Jr., ed., A House Divided: The Antebellum Slavery Debates in America, 1776–1865 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2003), 60.
27 Gen. 16:1–5.
28 For the best exposition of the bible’s support for slavery see Hector Avalos, Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011).
29 Annals of Congress, House of Representatives, 1st Congress, 2nd Sess., February 11, 1790, 1229.
30 Ibid., 1506.
31 See, e.g., Joseph Wilson’s sermon “Mutual Relation of Masters and Slaves as Taught in the Bible” in the First Presbyterian Church, Augusta, GA, January 6, 1861: “The Holy Spirit…has included slavery as an organizing element in that family order which lies at the very foundation of Church and State,” http://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/wilson/wilson.html.
32 Rev. Frederick A. Ross, Slavery Ordained of God (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1857), 5 (emph. in orig.).
33 Large excerpts of the address were printed in Daniel Lee’s The Genesee Famer (Rochester, NY) 15 (1854): 26, https://bit.ly/2F9NtWE, though I was first made aware of the address in Goldfield, America Aflame, 108.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
40 Thomas Cary Johnson, The Life and Letters of Benjamin Morgan Palmer (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 1906), 212–13.
41 Frederick Douglass, “American Slavery, American Religion, and the Free Church of Scotland: An Address Delivered in London, England, on May 22, 1846,” in American Slavery: Report of a Public Meeting…to Receive Frederick Douglass, the American Slave…, eds. John et al. (London, 1846), 12–13; John W. Blassingame et al., ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One—Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, vol. 1 (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), 269.
42 Mark A. Smith, Secular Faith: How Culture Has Trumped Religion in American Politics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2015), 57.
43 Ibid., 27.
44 Ibid., 58.
45 Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, vol. 1 (1973; repr. New York: Basic Books, 1997), 173.
46 Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, query 18. “For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labor. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.”
47 Goldfield, America Aflame, 10.
48 Herman Melville, “Shiloh: A Requiem (April 1862),” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175176. Melville is referring to the religious lies and the lies of glamorous war.
49 Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (1936, Macmillan; repr. ed. New York: Warner Books, 1993), 229.
50 Harold Adams Small, The Road to Richmond: The Civil War Memoirs of Major Abner R. Small… (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 1939), 85. Small takes a kinder view of the chaplains, thinking them untrained. See also Gerald Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 253–54.
51 Linderman, Embattled Courage, 254.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid.
55 Roy Morris, The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War (Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), 109.
56 Full text of the letter can be read at https://perma.cc/L3A3-P7SN.
57 Ibid. (emph. added).
58 Baptist Missionary Magazine (Massachusetts Baptist Convention, Boston) 30 (1850): 304, lists a Mark R. Watkinson as a Baptist in Philadelphia.
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p; 59 Stokes, Church and State in the United States, vol. 3, 601.
60 Rep. Herman P. Eberharter remarks, US Congress, House, Committee on Banking and Currency, 84th Congress, 1st Sess., in Miscellaneous Hearings (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1956), 53.
61 Theodore Roosevelt to William Boldly, November 11, 1907, repr. in Ted Schwarz, A History of United States Coinage (San Diego, CA: A. S. Barnes, 1980), 230. See actual letter at: https://perma.cc/B8CN-MZAX.
62 During the reinstatement debate in 1908, 42 Cong. Rec. 3384-91 (1908) at 3385.
63 H.R. Rep. No. 662, at 3 (1955).
64 Proceedings of the National Convention to Secure the Religious Amendment of the Constitution of the United States (Philadelphia: James B. Rodgers, 1872), iv, https://bit.ly/2W0Zrrf. (The vice presidency is noted at 2.)
65 Report of the Director of the Mint, in Report of the Secretary of the Treasury on the State of the Finances Year Ending June 30, 1863 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1863), 190–91, https://bit.ly/2Tyk5Cd.
66 H.R. Rep. No. 662, at 3 (1955).
67 An Act in amendment of an Act titled “An Act relating to Foreign Coins and the Coinage of Cents at the Mint of the United States,” 38th Congress, 1st Sess., Statutes at Large, 54–55. Congress did not vote specifically on the “in God we trust” language until 1865: “it shall be lawful for the director of the mint, with the approval of the Secretary of the Treasury, to cause the motto ‘In God we trust’ to be placed upon such coins.” An Act to Authorize Coinage of Three-Cent Pieces, 38th Congress, 2nd Sess., Statutes at Large, 517–18.
68 “Elihu,” American Mercury, February 18, 1788 (arguing against an acknowledgement of a deity in the new Constitution).
69 Journals of the Continental Congress, vol. 32, 1774–1789, ed. Worthington C. Ford et al. (Washington, DC, 1904–37), 223–25.
70 Ibid., 303–5.
71 Ibid., 303–5.
72 Eric Newman, The Early Paper Money of America (Atlanta: Whitman, 1967), 20, 33, 46.
The Founding Myth Page 43
