Party conventions to nominate US presidential candidates, of the type just concluded, always bring out accusations of plagiarism.
Last week, critics accused former US vice president Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate, of plagiarizing part of his speech — an allegation he has faced before.
Four years ago, US first lady Melania Trump faced the same accusation. As it happens, US President Donald Trump has also been hit with this charge.
Illustration: Yusha
Let us agree that plagiarism by writers is a knife to the vein. Is it equally serious when a politician does it? I am going to say: not so much.
In the first place, as former US federal judge Richard Posner points out in a delightful tome titled The Little Book of Plagiarism, the concept has no settled and precise definition. It is a fluid notion that covers a variety of wrongs in a variety of relationships.
However, everyone agrees that at the heart of plagiarism lies the notion of copying from someone else without saying so.
Copying what? A phrase? A sentence? A paragraph? The plot of a story? We know the answer when we see it.
Plagiarism is a recent idea. At times when the permissible range of ideas was severely circumscribed, of course writers imitated others. Copying was widespread and generally accepted. Shakespeare copied a lot, but he did not plagiarize.
Unlike Shakespeare, politicians labor in a field in which the supply of ideas remains limited. Small wonder they borrow from the best of what has gone before.
Consider what might be the two most famous lines in US political history.
First, there is the marvelous ending of former US president Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address in 1861: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Lincoln’s elegant plea came of course just as the US Civil War was about to break out — a war he hoped fervently to avoid.
What was Lincoln’s source? Every student of history knows that Lincoln rewrote a more cramped version of this line suggested by William H. Seward, who was soon to become US secretary of state in the Lincoln administration, and was supposedly borrowed from a speech Seward himself had once given. Lincoln came up with “the better angels of our nature” — the most famous part of the quotation — but the term had been used previously by others.
In an essay, Institute for American Values president David Blankenhorn last year argued persuasively that the 16thUS president borrowed from Shakespeare’s Othello.
Yet Lincoln, in delivering the speech, offered no attribution.
Then there is former US President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, delivered a century later in 1961. This is the most famous line: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”
Nobody thinks now, if anyone did then, that Kennedy or his writers made it up.
The Yale Book of Quotations, edited by my colleague Fred R. Shapiro, traces the likely inspiration to a 1925 essay by Kahlil Gibran.
“Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you or a zealous one asking what you can do for your country?” Gibran says.
In a 2011 book, long-time MSNBC host Chris Matthews says that a version of the line was recited regularly by George St John, headmaster at the Choate Rosemary Hall boarding school during the future US president’s time there.
Kennedy, like Lincoln, did not tell us where the lines came from.
Yet neither was a plagiarist. They spoke against a background of common themes and even common knowledge.
Most of Lincoln’s listeners would know he was cribbing from Shakespeare. Kennedy’s audience might not recognize the quote, but they would recognize the familiar idea that the social contract runs both ways.
Even if the audience did not know the source, what would be the harm? We are speaking of politicians, not the great sages of history or the minor scholars of the present day. We might no longer have a common background, but we know that it is awkward for a speaker to keep saying: “As Shakespeare wrote,” or: “As the Bible tells us.”
Should we call out our politicians for using phrases and paragraphs without disclosing that someone else used them first? Sure, we should, but not to the point where those arguments obscure debate over policy. A degree of examination of the originality of words spoken by politicians is healthy, but an absorption bordering on obsession is not. Correction is right, but flagellation is wrong.
Oh, by the way: I copied the style and substance of the previous paragraph, along with a number of the words, from a column penned by the great wordsmith William Safire in response to the fraud and plagiarism scandal that tarnished the the New York Times in 2003.
Did I plagiarize Safire? Nope, this paragraph saved me.
If I had instead cribbed from Shakespeare of the Bible, I would like to believe that nobody would have imagined that I was trying to put one past the reader. To borrow from a well-known source, as opposed to an obscure one, is not a trick or a wrong. It is a way of doing honor to the source, and to the reader as well, taking for granted that the audience is following along.
I would like to suggest that even if most of us see ourselves as more sinned against than sinning, we let those who are without sin cast the first stones.
One, that does not mean that nobody was ever accused of plagiarism. The Oxford English Dictionary attests a usage by the English cleric Richard Montagu in 1621.
Two, yes, others have offered earlier antecedents, back to classical antiquity.
Stephen Carter is a law professor at Yale University and was a clerk to former US Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall.
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