"Take Me to Your Leader"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Once, decades ago I heard the line actually quoted as "Take me (or "us") to your President!" without reference to the _New Yorker_.  I was already familiar with the "leader" form, so this stuck in my mind.

  It was undoubtedly during the 1960s, but conceivably I heard it in the _I Love Lucy_ episode in which Lucy and Ethel impersonated spacemen, re-run years after it first aired.

  So the actual caption was indeed quoted.

  JL

Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Fred Shapiro
Subject: "Take Me to Your Leader"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

See Yale Book of Quotations, page 320, for apparent source of this
expression in a 1953 New Yorker cartoon ("Kindly take us to your
President!"). The exact phrase "Take us to your leader!" appears in
Washington Post and Times Herald, July 14, 1955, page 43, in Walter
Winchell's column (I am coming to believe that Walter Winchell was a major
but uncredited originator of important quotations).

In a non-science-fiction context, "now take us to your leader" (American
soldier to Resistance fighters) appears in the Scorchy Smith comic strip as
found in The Evening Tribune (Albert Lea, Minnesota), 23 March 1944, page 14.

I would welcome any improvements on the above evidence.

Fred Shapiro


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fred R. Shapiro Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and YALE BOOK OF QUOTATIONS
Access and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press
Yale Law School ISBN 0300107986
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu http://quotationdictionary.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



---------------------------------
Need a quick answer? Get one in minutes from people who know. Ask your question on Yahoo! Answers.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org