The buck stops here?

[Fred Shapiro]

On Mon, 9 Oct 2006, Charles Doyle wrote:

> The OED, for its earliest citation of "The buck stops here," cites
> Truman's own papers for 1952.  The Washington Post, 15 Dec. 1946, quotes
> (a youthful) Clark Clifford describing the plaque on the president's
> desk with the saying incribed on it.
>
> According to Keyes's Quote Verifier, a friend of Truman's saw the saying
> on a sign on an Oklahoma prison warden's desk; the friend gave Turman a
> replica of the sign in Oct. 1945.

According to the Yale Book of Quotations, drawing on this very list serv:
"The _Reno_ (Nev.) _Evening Gazette_, 1 Oct. 1942, printed a photograph of
a sign clearly reading THE BUCK STOPS HERE on the desk of Army Colonel A.
B. Warfield.  Jonathan Lighter, editor of the _Historical Dictionary of
American Slang_, reports that he found these words in the periodical _Our
Army_ form the early of mid-1930s; the exact reference remains untraced."

Fred Shapiro


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