Famous First & Last Words

QUOTEMANSHIP: THE USE AND ABUSE OF QUOTATIONS FOR POLEMICAL AND OTHER PURPOSES by Paul F. Boller Jr. 454 pages. Southern Methodist University Press. $7.95.

Everyone is familiar with the way the evil practice called "quoting out of context" works. For example, a routine advertisement citing a review of this work might run thus: "WELL-WRITTEN . . . YOU'LL ENJOY . . . EVERY PAGE OF THIS BOOK . . . PUBLISHED WITH A GRANT FROM THE FORD FOUNDATION."

The actual review ought to go like this: "If you're looking for a well-written book about quotations, this isn't it. However, it does bring to mind how much you'll enjoy rereading Bartlett's. Every page of this book is padded with the author's insistent belaboring of the obvious. A key quotation is also omitted: the argument he used to get his book published with a grant from the Ford Foundation."

These shortcomings aside, there is something to be learned from scanning Quotemanship. Instead of simply listing his thousands of fascinating quotes--ranging from Gangster Al Capone on the American free-enterprise system to one Morris Zelditch on fluoridation--Historian Boller has chosen to weave them into a convincing argument for fair play in the use of quotations. But no matter how much harm may be done by distorting quotes, he demonstrates that the unretouched, straight quote can be most damaging of all. Practically everybody at one time or another has made statements that would better have been left unsaid.

Who Errs? Take these examples. Who, in 1939, said: "It has been assumed, in my opinion erroneously, that Japan covets the Philippine Islands. Just why has never been satisfactorily explained. Proponents of such a theory fail fully to credit the logic of the Japanese mind"?1 Or who, in 1933, after reading a speech by Chancellor Adolf Hitler, wrote: "We have heard once more, through the fog and the din, the hysteria and the animal passions of a great revolution, the authentic voice of a genuinely civilized people. I am not only willing to believe that, but it seems to me that all historical experience compels one to believe it"? 2

In 1945, who said: "The family is higher in Russia than in the United States, and God, looking down from heaven, may be more pleased with Russia than with us"?3 Or, in 1947, after an inspection tour of China: "The Chiang Kai-shek government cannot put down an insurrection against a government which is falsely called a Communist insurrection. Although Communist-backed, it is still a bonafide insurrection against a government which is little more than an agency of the Soong family"? 4 Of Mussolini, in 1935: "So great a man ... so wise a ruler"? 5 Of Richard Nixon, after a 1950 California senatorial vote: "I'm very happy that Helen Gahagan Douglas has just been defeated by Richard Nixon"? 6 And who errs, no fewer than four times, in referring to the late Time Inc. editor-in-chief as Henry C. Luce? 7

No Defense. "Without question," writes Boller, a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, President Johnson is "the quoting-est President ever to occupy the White House." But not even L.B.J. has been able to produce an adequate defense system to protect him from the politician's worst enemy. On Bobby Baker (before 1961): "I consider him as one of my most trusted, most loyal and most competent friends." On the Viet Nam war (1964): "We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys should be doing for themselves."

In the end, the only man or institution who comes out of Professor Boller's book with his reputation still intact is Calvin Coolidge. He wasn't known as "Silent Cal" for nothing.

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