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  • 2015-10-28 (xsd:date)
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  • Patton Pending (it)
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  • On 23 October 2015, the Facebook page Nation in Distress posted an image of famed U.S. General George S. Patton, along with a quote supposedly uttered by him about liberal democrats: While the meme is relatively new, the quote has been circulating by itself for several years, having appeared in the 1983 book The Unknown Patton by Charles M. Province. While The Unknown Patton written by a George S. Patton fanatic and contained dozens of quotes from the general, it shouldn't be considered an authoritative part of the historical record, as Province acknowledged in his introduction: While Province claimed to have done massive research for the book, his lack of footnotes made it impossible to trace the provenance of this quote to a specific source. Also, Province acknowledged that some of his source material was not literal and was instead used to provide background data to better understand General Patton. So, while many of the quotes in The Unknown Patton are accurate, others such as Patton's purported utterance of the phrase Politicians are the lowest forms of life and liberal democrats are the lowest forms of politicians, are unsourced, were previously not attributed to him, and were apparently provided as anecdotal evidence of Patton's ideology. The statement that government is bad and that politicians are the lowest form of life appeared in The College Anthology, published in 1949, and President Harry S. Truman recorded in his diary on 22 May 1945 that a professional liberal was the lowest form of politician. It's improbable that Patton (who passed away in 1945) originated or repeated either expression. It should also be noted that the term liberal Democrat wasn't a common phrase during Patton's lifetime (1885-1945), as back then both major political parties had liberal and conservative wings; and the term liberal was not yet the political pejorative that it became around the time The Unknown Patton was published. (en)
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