In Sunday’s Washington Post, writer Michael Grunwald has a (mostly) tongue-in-cheek column suggesting that the numerous Democratic 2008 hopefuls consider Al Gore a potential running mate. In doing so, he invokes one of the most famous put-downs* of the vice presidency:
John Nance Garner famously said that the vice presidency wasn’t worth a bucket of warm spit, and for Garner (who served under FDR) it probably wasn’t.
The problem is, this isn’t what Garner said. I can’t prove this as the moment, as Bartleby.com is still using the 1919 edition of Bartlett’s Quotations. But angry letter-writers to both the LA Weekly and Salon.com agree with me, and Google confirms (Exhibit A, Exhibit B) that the prevailing version is “a bucket of warm piss.” I mean, think about it for a second: Who would have the time to fill a whole bucket with spit?
This was hardly the first time I’ve seen Garner misquoted, and I decided to ask Grunwald himself if this was an editor’s call or his own decision. He got back to me in short order:
I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t even know the original quote was “warm piss.” I certainly would have gone for the accurate version if I had, although as you undoubtedly know, “warm spit” is how the quotation has come down through the ages, probably because (according to my quick google search) the reporters who wrote about it at the time all used the euphemism.
He’s certainly right about that, and to this day some newspapers try to keep cursing at least out of their print editions, even when the word is an integral part of the story. The New York Times struggled with President Bush’s recent reference to an even less savory human excretion — not the first time a mic has caught his mild expletives, either — while the Post let the president speak for himself. As in Garner’s day, the mass media still worries about offending the masses’ sensibilities.
Grunwald also isn’t the only knowledgable person to get this quote wrong. TCU history professor Michael L. Collins has passed the saying along as “a quart of warm piss.” Earlier this year Jonathan Alter of Newsweek (the Post’s sister publication) pointed out the “piss” vs. “spit” discrepancy — apparently Garner wasn’t pleased with the bowdlerized version — but somehow got “bucket” mixed up with “pitcher.”
How serious is this, really? Well, the quote is funnier in its original incarnation, and depicts Garner’s orneriness more accurately. To be sure, the euphemism doesn’t withhold any significant facts, but for those who do know the actual quote, it probably does hurt a newspaper’s reputation, or that of the reporter, to see “spit” in print.
Absent the explanation — which is why I asked Grunwald first — it sounds like the Post is keeping an inconvenient truth (ba dum) from its readers. It may be wrong to suggest that a paper which will hide the ugly truth on small things will also hide the truth about larger things; I don’t think it necessarily follows, certainly not as a matter of logic — but that doesn’t mean people won’t think it. It’s a small thing, but accuracy is still the best policy.
The Post should run a correction, but they’ll probably judge this below the threshhold of what matters. After all, the “spit” quote has a history of its own. What the Post really should have done is make comments available on political stories already.
*The other, and my personal favorite, is from Sen. Daniel Webster, who rejected Zachary Taylor’s offer to run with him (the two had both sought the Whig nomination) in 1848, saying:
I do not propose to be buried until I am dead.
Taylor went on to win the election, but died soon after, which would have made Webster president anyway. Instead we got Millard Fillmore.
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