Why is there a fake Abe Lincoln quote in the Haymarket?
It's not the first time the city has done this either.
Hi,
We're all entitled to the occasional rant about an inconsequential annoyance. So I'm cashing mine in today. This is truly a minor complaint in the scheme of things, but that Abraham Lincoln quote that adorns the Lumberworks Garage in the Haymarket? Yeah, it's fake.
I should be more precise. The quote — "I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives" — is one half of a longer statement commonly attributed to Lincoln. The full version goes something like this:
I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him.
It sounds great and, given the city's insistence on centering Abe Lincoln iconography in its public image, slapping his quote on a shiny redevelopment project intended mostly for tourists seems reasonable, if a little corny. The problem is there's no evidence Lincoln ever said or wrote anything like this! That's not just my opinion; it's also the position of the former Lincoln Curator at the Illinois State Historical Library, a man who has definitely forgotten more about Honest Abe than I'll ever bother to learn. People love to misquote Lincoln and this is just one of many many statements with little (or in this case, no) historical basis.
So what happened here?
Unfortunately, I don't have a good answer (yet) or a particular person to blame, as satisfying as that would be. This is a rant, not a piece of investigative reporting. But I did get distracted for a few hours yesterday and dug up some interesting history.
Before it somehow ended up on a Haymarket garage, the quote was a zombified creature of the internet; you've probably seen it pasted over a serene photo of waves or mountains and shared by your uncle on Facebook. But it has a much older provenance that predates the web: The first documented instances I can find appeared around 1907, including in an issue of the now-defunct University Place News (later the Northeast Lincoln News). The quote pops up in a bunch of newspapers around this time and is attributed to Lincoln (who'd been dead for over forty years at this point), but none provide an original source.
Hilariously, the Haymarket garage isn't the first time a local institution has used this same dubious quote as part of its branding. It was seemingly pretty popular in the 1920s as an advertising slogan, both in Lincoln and elsewhere. Check out this slightly different version used by Woodruff Printing, a now-vanished local business, back in 1921:
This is a fascinating document because it appropriates the quote, not merely to reinforce some nebulous sense of appreciation for the city, but to brag about the success of Lincoln's industries (and specifically, well, book printing). You, oh citizen of Lincoln, should tell people how great the city is by namechecking our great businesses. Being proud of the place where one lives is, in this context, dependent on local business owners making a bunch of money. As the ad says rather bluntly, "Better Printing — Better Profits."
My other favorite local example of this spurious quote comes from a 1959 ad for the Lincoln Mutual Life Insurance Company:
This usage is not as crass. It leans less on explicit paeans to how great it is to make money in Lincoln. But that might be because the ad ran in a special edition of the Lincoln Star commemorating the city's centennial. Here, being proud of the place where you live is more generically celebratory and more in line with how the modern Haymarket version feels. It's all still about commerce at the end of the day — feeling good about Lincoln means you should be spending $10 on parking and eating at Lazlo's or whatever — but the primary emphasis is on cultivating a generic, broadly appealing sense of civic pride.
Do I think that whoever is responsible for placing the quote — whether that was the architectural firm that designed the garage, or some urban planner working for the city — had all this in mind? No of course not! I think it's clear they had absolutely nothing in mind. It took me about two minutes on Google to discover that presidential historians say the quote's authenticity is dubious. This whole thing is emblematic, not of carefully considered messaging about what kind of city we want Lincoln to be, but of total carelessness.
And you know what? I ultimately do like to see a person proud of the place in which they live. (You can cite me as the source from now on if you like.)
But one thing that doesn't exactly fill me with pride is having to see this quote when I visit the Haymarket.
~ Ty
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