Arts: Roland Emmerich Blows Up the White House, and History, Again

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Brow Beat Roland Emmerich Blows Up the White House, and History, Again By Forrest Wickman Posted Wednesday, Mar 27, 2013, at 06:59 PM ET At the beginning of the trailer for Roland Emmerich's White House Down, 9/11-esque news reports showing a national catastrophe are intercut with a quote from Abraham Lincoln. Jetliners are brought down, the U.S. Capitol Building collapses into a cloud of dust, the White House is hit by an explosion, and the titles cut in to bring us the following warning from Uncle Abe: "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." – Abraham Lincoln Except Abraham Lincoln never said that. As language historian Barry Popik pointed out on his blog last December, the quote is frequently attributed to Lincoln, but Lincoln never said those words. The quote seems to derive from a remark made by Lincoln when he was 28, in his speech on "The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions": If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide. The speech—prompted by the burning of a black freeman, named McIntosh, in St. Louis and the subsequent lynching of an abolitionist, Elijah P. Lovejoy, in Illinois—was about the danger of lawless mobs, especially those attacking abolitionists. Lincoln's prescription for fighting these impassioned mobs was "reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason." What reasonable man distorted Lincoln's quote about the dangers of out-of-control mobs? The answer is—who else?—Joseph McCarthy, who said the following ... To continue reading, click here. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate The Nine Senate Democrats Who Still Don't Support Gay Marriage What Happened in Vegas? The Best Variations on the Red Equals Sign	Advertisement
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