newsminer.com

Can you guess the originator of the following quotes?

“You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.”

“You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.”

“You cannot help small men up by tearing big men down.”

Those and seven others quotes have been attributed to Abraham Lincoln under the heading “Ten Points” or “The American Charter” and have been widely distributed under Lincoln’s name. They appeared again on Saturday, on page B3 of the News-Miner in a weekly column of North Pole news items.

But the words aren’t Lincoln’s.

They are, researchers have found, the words of William J. H. Boetcker, a German immigrant. Boetcker in 1916 published a writing that contained some words of Lincoln on one side and his own thoughts — 10 points — on the back side. People eventually and erroneously took Boetcker’s 10 points to be Lincoln’s. So say the researchers. Or at least the researchers whose work I’ve been able to find in a 10-minute search on the Web.

The case of the faux Lincoln words just goes to show that the possibilities that come with using the Web for research include the not-so-good possibility of being misled. It happens, but we need to do our best to guard against it and to correct it when it does.

Thanks to David James, one of the News-Miner’s regular contributors, for pointing this out to us.