“A little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing.”

In 1786, the new democratic government of the United States of America wasn’t quite working out like some Revolutionary War veterans had expected.

Many had not been paid for their military service in local state militias or the Continental Army as promised.

And, when they went back to their family farms, they found they were subject to heavy new state taxes imposed to help pay off government war debts owed to rich merchants.

Many farmers who couldn’t afford to pay their taxes and other debts had their farms seized and were sentenced to serve time a debtors’ prison.

In response, angry veterans in Massachusetts began joining together to take over and shut down local courts. One group of vets tried to take over the local armory.

This mini-revolt — called “Shays’ Rebellion” after one of its leaders, Daniel Shays — was quickly and forcefully crushed by the Massachusetts state militia, under orders from Governor James Bowdoin.

Many of the “rebels” were put in prison. Some were executed, as recommended by Founding Father Samuel Adams.

Drawing a somewhat arbitrary distinction between governments with and without kings at the top, Adams said:

“Rebellion against a king may be pardoned, or lightly punished, but the man who dares to rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.”

Adams’ fellow Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, who was in Paris at the time, agreed that there was a distinction between a monarchy and America’s new system of government. But his view of the anti-tax uprising in Massachusetts was less harsh.

Two of Jefferson’s most famous quotations are from letters he wrote about Shays’ Rebellion.

One of those oft-cited quotes — “I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing” — was in a letter he wrote to James Madison on January 30, 1787.

Jefferson said in the letter that a democratic government like America’s “has a great deal of good in it. The mass of mankind under that enjoys a precious degree of liberty and happiness. It has its evils, too, the principal of which is the turbulence to which it is subject. But weigh this against the oppressions of monarchy, and it becomes nothing.”

He continued:

“I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people, which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions, as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.”

Later that same year, Jefferson penned another famous quote that referred to Shays’ Rebellion:

In a letter to Col. William Smith, dated November 13, 1787, he said:

       “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time
        to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Both of Jefferson’s famous quotes about Shays’ Rebellion are still frequently cited by people who are “mad as hell” about something the government has done.

Today, relatively few people actually believe that the sentiments Jefferson expressed should be acted out literally, through a violent revolution. 

The gun-toting protesters who show up at some Tea Party rallies and anti-gun control events may be among those few.

Perhaps some of them are descendants of Daniel Shays.

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“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

The quote “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” is often mistakenly attributed to the Irish lawyer and politician John Philpot Curran and frequently to Thomas Jefferson.

In fact, Curran’s line was somewhat different. What he actually said, in a speech in Dublin on July 10, 1790, was:

       “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.”

And, according to Jefferson scholars there is “no evidence to confirm that Thomas Jefferson ever said or wrote, ‘Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty’ or any of its variants.”

Traditionally, the most famous use of “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” that’s included in books of quotations is from a speech made by the American Abolitionist and liberal activist Wendell Phillips on January 28, 1852.

Speaking to members of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society that day, Phillips said:

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten. The living sap of today outgrows the dead rind of yesterday. The hand entrusted with power becomes, either form human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continued oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot; only by unintermitted agitation can a people be sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.”

However, Anna Berkes, a research librarian at the Jefferson Library, has discovered uses that predate Phillips’ speech.

In a post on the Jefferson Library blog, Berkes wrote:

“Not to be mean to Mr. Wendell Phillips, but he’s about to get slightly less famous. After two days of ridiculously feverish searching, I’ve traced the purported Phillips version of this quote all the way back to 1809.  (For the record, Mr. Phillips was -2 years old at that time.)”

Berkes noted that, in a biography of Major General James Jackson published in 1809, author Thomas Charlton used the same words, just in a different order. Charlton wrote that that one of the obligations of biographers of famous people is “fastening upon the minds of the American people the belief, that ‘the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.’”

Berkes also found several news articles that include the more familiar version of the line as later used by Phillips.

For example, an article in the May 2, 1833 edition of The Virginia Free Press and Farmers' Repository says:

“Some one has justly remarked, that ‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.’ Let the sentinels on the watch-tower sleep not, and slumber not.”

One of the news articles she found, in the January 4, 1838 edition of the Pennsylvania Inquirer and Daily Courier, uses the same quote and attributes it to Thomas Jefferson — one of the earliest sources to do so.

Berkes reiterated that the consensus of Jefferson scholars is that he never spoke or wrote the words “‘Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

She also concluded that, although Wendell Phillips still gets credit for the most famous use of that phrase, it was already a well-known saying prior to his speech in 1852.

Many witty variations on this old saying have been created since then. My personal favorite is by the novelist Aldous Huxley. In an  introduction to the 1965 radio version of his novel Brave New World, Huxley said: “Eternal vigilance is not only the price of liberty; eternal vigilance is the price of human decency.”

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The story behind “The Year of Living Dangerously”

Google has a cool tool for researchers of words and phrases called the Ngram Viewer.

It graphs the occurrence of a word or phrase in books published between the years 1500 and 2008.

If you do an Ngram search for the phrase “the year of living dangerously,” you’ll see a huge, continuing spike starting in the early 1980s.

That’s because it gained its major worldwide popularity after being used as the title of the film The Year of Living Dangerously, which was released here in the United States on January 21, 1983 after debuting in Australia on December 17, 1982.

The movie stars Mel Gibson (back when he was still cool and hot), Sigourney Weaver (who is still cool and hot) and Linda Hunt, in a breakthrough, Oscar-winning role as a man.

It was only a modest hit at the box office.

However, the title became a huge hit as a phrase in English and has since spawned many variations.

Indeed, if you Google “the year of living *” -dangerously (using Boolean search techniques to look for versions of the phrase that don’t include the word dangerously), you’ll see thousands of variations.

A few recent examples include:

• the title of the best-selling book The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible;

• the title of the more recent, less pious book A Year of Living Sinfully: A Self-Serving Guide to Doing Whatever the Hell You Want; and,

• an op-ed by humorist Will Durst that dubbed 2012 “The Year of Living Stupidly.” (Durst noted: “…the only thing that really went right with 2012 was we misread the Mayan Calendar. Everything else is either worse than we found it or the same. Middle East a mess? Check. Crazy people with guns? Check. Weather getting weird? Check. Congress unable to accomplish any sort of worthwhile task, including differentiating between their gluteus maximus and yellow paint? Double check.”)

Although the 1982 movie made “the year of living dangerously” a widely-known catchphrase, it’s not the origin.

Nor is the 1978 novel The Year of Living Dangerously by Christopher J. Koch, which movie is based on.

The book is set in Jakarta, Indonesia during the chaotic period that led to the overthrow of the country’s long-time dictator, President Sukarno.

Author Koch took his title from a speech Sukarno made in 1964.

The President had a custom of giving a special name to each year in his annual “National Day” speech.

In the National Day speech he gave on August 17, 1964, Sukarno named the upcoming year “the year of living dangerously.”

This reflected the challenges he knew he faced from his political enemies, who included both hard-line Communists and radical Muslims.

The multilingual leader’s name for the year was based partly on an old Italian phrase he was familiar with — “vivere pericoloso” (“living dangerously”).

Although Sukarno gave the speech in the Indonesian language, he inserted those Italian words after the Indonesian word for year, tahun, to create the name.

The year ahead, he said, would be the “Tahun vivere pericoloso.”

The Google Ngram for “the year of living dangerously” suggests that it first appeared in English-language books around the time Sukarno gave his 1964 National Day address. Some sources credit him with coining it and, based on what I know at this point, I think he probably did.

Either way, his choice of the name for the coming year certainly turned out to be prophetic. In September of 1965, a bloody coup began that led to his overthrow.

Hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were killed in the power struggle. Sukarno survived and was allowed to live out the rest of his days under “house arrest,” until his death in Jakarta on June 21, 1970.

His phrase “the year of living dangerously” and its numerous linguistic offspring live on.

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Special Editor’s Note: Happy Birthday to my oldest, closest friend and the first reader of this blog, Matt Eckstein! I hope this is a Year of Living Blissfully for you and Pam at your Bed & Breakfast on St. Thomas in the USVI.

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The origin of the slogan “Sisterhood is Powerful.”

In 1970, feminist leader and author Robin Morgan edited an anthology of articles about the growing woman’s liberation movement titled Sisterhood Is Powerful.

The book quickly became a bestseller and the title became a famous phrase and slogan. But it wasn’t created by Morgan.

According to many sources, “Sisterhood is Powerful” was coined in 1968 by another pioneering feminist leader, Kathie Sarachild, who was then known as Kathie Amatniek.

It was part of something Amatniek wrote for a leaflet distributed at an anti-Vietnam War event by the Jeanette Rankin Brigade (a coalition of women’s groups named after the first woman elected to Congress in 1917).

The event was held on January 15, 1968 in Washington D.C.

One of the best recollections of what happened that day was written by another well-known feminist and peace activist of the era, Shulamith Firestone.

In her account (published on the Marxist.org website), Firestone said:

A coalition of women’s groups united for a specific purpose: to confront Congress on its opening day, Jan. 15, 1968, with a strong show of female opposition to the Vietnam War...

Peg Dobbins wrote a long funeral dirge lamenting woman’s traditional role which encourages men to develop aggression and militarism to prove their masculinity. There were several related pamphlets, including one written by Kathie Amatniek which elaborated on the following Progression:

TRADITIONAL WOMANHOOD IS DEAD.
TRADITIONAL WOMEN WERE BEAUTIFUL...BUT REALLY POWERLESS.
“UPPITY” WOMEN WERE EVEN MORE BEAUTIFUL...BUT STILL POWERLESS.
SISTERHOOD IS POWERFUL!
HUMANHOOD THE ULTIMATE!

Finally, by way of a black-bordered invitation we “joyfully” invited many of the 5,000 women there to attend a burial that evening at Arlington “by torchlight” of Traditional Womanhood, “who passed with a sigh to her Great Reward this year of the Lord, 1968, after 3,000 years of bolstering the egos of Warmakers and aiding the cause of war...”

“Sisterhood is Powerful” went on to become a popular feminist catchphrase. 

Shulamith and Amatniek went on to found the famous/infamous “Redstockings” women’s lib group.

Amatniek, now known as Kathie Sarachild, is now the director of the Redstockings “Archives for Action.” 

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“V for Victory!”

Almost everyone is familiar with the phrase “V for Victory” and the two-fingered V-for-victory hand gesture popularized by Winston Churchill during World War II. But few people today are aware of their origin.

The use of “V” as a symbolic message of resistance to — and fight for victory over — tyranny was first proposed by Victor de Laveleye, a member of the Belgian Parliament who went into exile in England after the Nazis invaded Belgium in 1940.

De Laveleye worked for the BBC during the war, broadcasting regular shortwave radio announcements to his countrymen in Belgium.

In his broadcast on January 14, 1941, he proposed what became the “V campaign.”

“I am proposing to you as a rallying emblem the letter V,” he said, “because V is the first letter of the words ‘Victoire’ in French, and ‘Vrijheid’ in Flemish [the two major languages of people in Belgium]...the Victory which will give us back our freedom, the Victory of our good friends the English. Their word for Victory also begins with V. As you see, things fit all round.”

Shortly after de Laveleye’s broadcast, Belgians began surreptitiously chalking and painting V’s on the walls of buildings in Belgium. Soon, the V symbol began appearing as defiant graffiti in other Nazi-occupied countries.

In July of 1941, British Prime Minister Churchill announced an effort to actively promote the V campaign throughout Europe.

“The V sign is the symbol of the unconquerable will of the occupied territories and a portent of the fate awaiting Nazi tyranny,” Churchill said. “So long as the peoples continue to refuse all collaboration with the invader it is sure that his cause will perish and that Europe will be liberated.”

The V campaign was heavily publicized by the BBC and successful enough to greatly annoy the Germans.

As V graffiti spread in German-occupied countries, the Nazis tried to co-opt it by claiming that V stood for “viktoria,” the German word for victory. They said the use of V’s by civilians was a sign of support for Germany.

But most people knew that was simply another Nazi “big lie.”

Further reading:

     • Historic July 20, 1941 New York Times article “British Open ‘V’ Nerve War; Churchill Spurs Resistance” 

     • Historic article about the V campaign in the July 28, 1941 issue of Time magazine

     • Wikipedia entry on uses of the V hand gesture in various cultures

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The origin of the movie cliché: “We have ways of making you talk!”

Nowadays, it’s a cliché usually said for comedic effect, often with a German accent as if said by an evil Nazi, and delivered as a personalized threat: “Ve haf vays of making you talk!”

As classic film buffs know, the origin of this comedic line can be traced back to an old Gary Cooper movie and, with or without the German accent, “We have ways of making you talk” is actually a misquote of the original line in that movie.

The film, titled The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, is based on the 1930 book by the British Army officer and author Francis Yeats-Brown (1886–1944).

It premiered in New York City on January 11, 1935.

The Lives of a Bengal Lancer is a Rudyard Kipling-style tale, set in India in the days when it was still a British colony. The heroes of the saga are three British officers in the famed Bengal Lancers, Lieutenant McGregor, Lieutenant Forsythe and Lieutenant Stone, played by Gary Cooper, Franchot Tone and Richard Cromwell.

The plot deals with their efforts to thwart a revolt by an Indian version of Osama bin Laden named Mohammed Khan, played by the great character actor Douglas Dumbrille.

At one point, the three officers are captured by Mohammed Khan. Over a deceptively cordial dinner, Mohammed Khan says he will let them go if they give him some information he wants. When Franchot Tone flippantly refuses, he makes his ominous threat — in perfectly good English, with no silly accent.

Mohammed Khan: “You have only to answer two very simple questions. By what route is the ammunition train coming? And, just where does the regiment plan to meet it for convoy?"

Lieutenant Forsythe: “Well, when the furry little animal jumped out of the bag he really jumped, didn’t he?”

Mohammed Khan: “Well, gentlemen? We have ways to make men talk.”

Getting no information by asking nicely, Mohammed Khan applies his “ways” of encouraging conversation.

Starting with Gary Cooper, the three soldiers have sharp slivers of bamboo inserted under their fingernails. Then the bamboo slivers are set on fire.

Somehow, over the decades Mohammed Khan’s sinister line from The Lives of a Bengal Lancer morphed into a comedic cliché, usually in a misquoted form. And, today, most people are unaware of its origin.

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“I have nothing to declare except my genius” – the famous Oscar Wilde quote Oscar probably didn’t say…

On January 3, 1882, the Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde disembarked from the ship that brought him from England to New York.

It was the beginning of what would be a high-profile, 11-month-long speaking tour of America and Canada.

As noted by the definitive website about that tour, Oscar Wilde in America, the ship arrived in port the night before but was held in quarantine until the next morning.

That’s apparently why the date some sources attach to a famous quotation attributed to Wilde is January 2, 1882.

In point of fact it was the morning of January 3rd when Wilde left the ship and went to the New York Customs House, where government agents asked their standard question: Do you have anything to declare?

Wilde supposedly answered: “I have nothing to declare except my genius.”

This quip is cited by thousands of books of quotations and websites. Indeed, it’s one of the best known of Wilde’s many witty quotes.

However, unlike those that come from Wilde’s plays and other writings, it’s not a line that can be verified as something he actually said.

In the new book Declaring His Genius: Oscar Wilde in North America, historian Roy Morris, Jr. notes:

“No one actually heard him say it, but it sounded like something Wilde would have said, and by the time literary biographer Arthur Ransome quoted it first in his 1912 study of the author, the quip already had passed into legend.”

Arthur Ransome himself didn’t put the famed wisecrack in quotation marks in his book, Oscar Wilde, a Critical Study. He simply alluded to it, writing that one of the famous things Wilde did in America was “to tell the Customs Officials that he had nothing to declare but his genius.”

The first known appearance of the witticism as an actual quote, with quotation marks, is in the biography Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions by Frank Harris, published in 1916.

That’s the source cited by most books of quotations that actually provide a source, instead of simply listing the quote as “attributed.”

Harris wrote in his book about Wilde:

“His phrase to the Revenue officers on landing: ‘I have nothing to declare except my genius,’ turned the limelight full upon him and excited comment and discussion all over the country.”

However, there’s no known reference to the legendary quote in any of the many newspaper articles written about Wilde during his North American tour.

Thus, the claim that it played a key role in focusing attention on Wilde during the tour seems to have been made up by Harris.

And, it appears likely that the quote itself was made up after Wilde died in 1900.

The most in-depth source of information on this question is probably the Oscar Wilde in America website. It’s maintained by John Cooper, an amazingly knowledgeable Wilde aficionado from England who now lives in the US.

On his web page about the quote, Cooper notes that Ransome and Harris both wrote their biographies of Wilde more than a decade after his death.

There is no known record of the quote in anything written while Wilde was still alive.

Based on his extensive research, Cooper classifies “I have nothing to declare except my genius” as a “dubious quotation.”

His Oscar Wilde in America site also provides the background on a number of verified quotations that Wilde made during his North American tour and, later, about Americans.

Many are quite funny.

But none are quite as famous as Wilde’s alleged declaration of his genius — about which the one certain thing is that it is linked to his arrival at the Customs House in New York in January of 1882.

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