Locke's Harlem/big apple quote --- what might have happened

[Joel S. Berson]

At 6/14/2009 05:48 PM, Gerald Cohen wrote:
>...
>Here's the key portion of the letter:
>Œ...According to Harlem griots (oral historians), the clue to the
>mystery is Harlem.  It is my understanding that Alain Locke,
>professor of philosophy at Howard University, originated the term
>during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920¹s.
>    ŒDr. Locke, a graduate of Harvard University and the first black
>Rhodes Scholar to attend Oxford University, used the term to depict
>Harlem as the precious fruit in the Garden of Eden, an oasis for the
>literary, musical and painting talents of oppressed black American
>intellectuals. ...'
>
>Note that Ms. Daniels doesn't give Locke's statement as a quote.  *She*
>(relying on the griots) is the one who interprets how Locke felt about
>Harlem, and very possibly she is correct in this.  But that's not the same
>as asserting that those were his very words.

One algorithm is:
A paraphrases X as having said something, or
having discussed something.  No quotation marks.
B sees what A wrote, and being a conscientious
scholar, puts quotes around his quotation from
A.  But which part of the quotation is X's words
and which part A's words has become obscure.
C sees what B wrote, which has quotation marks,
and assumes X wrote it when actually B wrote it.

(I encountered a case exactly like this in my
(American colonial period) historical research.)

>... There's a snowball effect here. Each time the quote is
>mentioned uncritically in a new work, the assumption of its being bona fide
>is increased.

I can undoubtedly find writers on historiography
who (paraphrasing, not quoting -- but since I'm
giving neither name nor date, I can't get anyone
into trouble) say how once an error gets into
print it's almost impossible to eliminate it; or
comment on the tendency of historians to form a
chain of citation of their predecessors' errors.

Joel

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