It’s not a big deal when politicians plagiarize

Presidential nominating conventions of the type just concluded always seem to bring out accusations of plagiarism. Last week, critics accused Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden of plagiarizing part of his speech — an allegation he has faced before. Four years ago, First Lady Melania Trump faced the same accusation. As it happens, President Donald Trump has also been hit with this charge.

Let’s agree that plagiarism by writers is a knife to the vein. Is it equally serious when a politician does it? I’m going to say ... not so much.

In the first place, as retired federal judge Richard Posner points out in a delightful tome called “The Little Book of Plagiarism,” the concept has no settled and precise definition. It’s a fluid notion that covers a variety of wrongs in a variety of relationships. Everyone agrees that at the heart of plagiarism lies the notion of copying from someone else without saying so. But copying what? A phrase? A sentence? A paragraph? The plot of a story?

We know the answer when we see it. Plagiarism is a recent idea. The permissible range of ideas was severely circumscribed, so of course writers imitated others. Copying was widespread and generally accepted. Shakespeare copied a lot; but he didn’t plagiarize.

And unlike Shakespeare, politicians labor in a field in which the supply of ideas remains limited.

Consider what may be the two most famous lines in American political history.

First, there’s the marvelous ending of President Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address in 1861: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Lincoln’s elegant plea came of course just as the Civil War was about to break out — a war he hoped fervently to avoid.

But what was Lincoln’s source? Every student of history knows that Lincoln rewrote a more cramped version of this line suggested by William H. Seward, soon to be his secretary of state, supposedly borrowed from a speech Seward himself had once given. Lincoln himself came up with “the better angels of our nature” — the most famous part of the quotation — but the term had been used previously by others. In a 2019 essay, David Blankenhorn argues persuasively that the sixteenth president borrowed from Shakespeare’s “Othello.”

Yet Lincoln, in delivering the speech, offered no attribution.

Then there’s President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, delivered a century later in 1961. Here’s the most famous line: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”

Nobody thinks now, if anyone did then, that Kennedy or his writers made it up. “The Yale Book of Quotations,” edited by my colleague Fred R. Shapiro, traces the likely inspiration to a 1925 essay by Kahlil Gibran: “Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you or a zealous one asking what you can do for your country?” Chris Matthews, in his 2011 book “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero,” reports that a version of the line was recited regularly by George St. John, headmaster at Choate during the future president’s time there.

Yet Kennedy didn’t tell us where the line came from.

Neither, however, was a plagiarist. They spoke against a background of common themes and even common knowledge.

Should we call out our politicians for using phrases and paragraphs without disclosing that someone else used them first? Sure. But not to the point where those arguments obscure debate over policy. A degree of examination of the originality of words spoken by politicians is healthy; an absorption bordering on obsession is not. Correction is right; flagellation is wrong.

Oh, by the way. I copied the style and substance of the previous paragraph, from a column penned by the great wordsmith William Safire in response to the fraud and plagiarism scandal that tarnished the Times some years back. Did I plagiarize Safire? Nope: This paragraph saved me.

So I’d like to suggest that even if most of us see ourselves as more sinned against than sinning, we let those who are without sin cast the

first stones.