Historical Response #12: Ellen Brown Admits That Her Jefferson Quote on Banks Was Bogus.
Ellen Brown admits she has dropped the bogus Jefferson quote.
12. A bogus quote from Jefferson on banksThat quote has been omitted from my 4th edition, after it was pointed out to me that it was apocryphyal.
But the thousands of people who read her first three editions did not know that the quote was bogus until she posted her 31 responses to my criticisms of her historical research. She has yet to publish a list of her previous use of bogus quotes in a department on Page 1 of her website. She should.
She did not do her homework. That quote was obviously bogus. Here is what I wrote.
Ellen Brown loves to quote from the Founding Fathers. It's a shame that so many of her quotations are fakes. Here is one.Jefferson is quoted as saying:
If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property, until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied. [Web of Debt, p. 76]It took me about two minutes to track down this whopper. This, of course, was way too much time for lawyer Brown to invest. I found it on Wikiquotes.
If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency (instead of Congress), first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied.Attributed to Thomas Jefferson, letter to then Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin, 1802. The book Respectfully Quoted says this is "obviously spurious", noting that the OED's earliest citation for the word "deflation" is from 1920. The earliest known appearance of this quote is from 1935 (Testimony of Charles C. Mayer, Hearings Before the Committee on Banking and Currency, House of Representatives, Seventy-fourth Congress, First Session, on H.R. 5357, p. 799)
It took a sharp-eyed reader to spot this one, as she admits. This was three years after the first edition.
An author is supposed to verify the evidence before publishing a book. Ellen Brown never bothered. This is why I have identified 31 historical errors and 21 errors in economic theory in her 2008 edition.
Her responses have me 31 additional opportunities to demonstrate that she did not know what she was talking about when she wrote The Web of Debt.
I hope she responds to my 21 challenges to her economic theory.