Word: lieing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Sirs: Was it not Parson Weems (TIME, Oct. 2) who invented or at least popularized the equally famous lie about Washington saying his prayers in a snowdrift...
...Lie-or legend-it was Parson Weems. Wrote he: "In the winter of '77, while Washington, with the American Army, lay encamped at Valley Forge, a certain good old Friend, of the respectable family and name of Potts, if I mistake not, had occasion to pass through the woods near headquarters. . . . As he approached the spot with a cautious step, whom should he behold in a dark natural bower of ancient oaks, but the commander in chief of the American Armies on his knees in prayer...
...Leonid Leonov suddenly broke off a discussion of play writing to say with great emotion: "But if in the world of tomorrow a three-year-old girl may be shot, as I have seen one shot by our enemy, then I say now that astronomical observatories are a lie, medical laboratories are a lie, railroads are a lie, techniques are a lie, writing is a lie, and our Russian theater is a lie...
...Roosevelt feigned some reluctance in saying it, but there seemed to be something a bit "foreign" creeping into the campaign this year-a "propaganda technique invented by the dictators abroad." It was, he feared, a technique out of Mein Kampf; never tell a small lie, make it a fantastic whopper and keep repeating...
Parson Weems has been remembered by generations of Americans only as the man -presumably a dust-dry, thin-lipped little pedant-who invented or at least popularized the most famous lie in U.S. history: the fable of George Washington and the cherry tree. As revived by Van Wyck Brooks in The World of Washington Irving, the Rev. Mason Locke Weems appears to have been an attractive and useful citizen. A cheerful, ruddy-faced clergyman who had given up his parish to become a book agent (the Episcopal Church in the South was demoralized after the Revolution), Parson Weems...