"The Ten Cannots"

By Bob Decker
January 11, 2009

“I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my hatchet.” – Abraham Lincoln

House Republican Leader Scott Sales (R-Bozeman) made news late last week when it was discovered that, in his opening speech to his colleagues, he mistakenly attributed a series of political maxims to Abraham Lincoln.

After the Lee Newspapers State Bureau investigated the quotations and informed Rep. Sales of his error, Sales apologized, then took steps to correct the record with his House colleagues.

“I was duped,” Rep. Sales said. “I got them off the Internet. It wasn’t my intention to mislead.”

I’m with Rep. Sales on all counts. First of all, like everyone else striving to prepare content for a speech, he looked elsewhere for material to bolster whatever original thought he might have scraped together. And Lincoln is certainly in the pantheon of go-to sources, below Shakespeare, of course, but right up there with Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker, Mark Twain, Yogi Berra, Woody Allen, and Calvin Coolidge (“If you don’t say anything, you won’t be called on to repeat it.”).

And who hasn’t been burned by relying on the Internet? If you can’t believe everything you read on hard copy, much of which has been written, edited, proofed, and printed at great trouble and expense, what is the veracity factor in a medium where authors are countless, fact-checkers are hen’s teeth, and the audience is a keyboard click away?

Finally, Rep. Sales doesn’t strike me as a politician who spends a lot of energy feigning his thoughts or feeling strongly both ways. However much I might disagree with his ideology, I appreciate not having to labor to know it.

Ideology is a key word here, as that is what Rep. Sales sought to communicate. For aphoristic help, he turned to “The Ten Cannots,” a pamphlet written (supposedly!) by William J.H. Boetcker, a Presbyterian minister and political conservative of the early twentieth century. Sometime after Boetcker’s pamphlet was published, his sayings were attributed to Lincoln.

In his speech, Rep. Sales cited eight of Boetcker’s Ten Cannots, but to give you full flavor, here’s the complete list:

• You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.


• You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.


• You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.


• You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.


• You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.


• You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.


• You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.


• You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.


• You cannot build character and courage by destroying men's initiative and independence.


• And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.

As with many ideologies, especially as offered in gleaming nuggets, there is much to allure us, and Boetcker used particular care in his choice of verbs and his construction of, ahem, misleading choices. Most of us don’t think fondly of political objectives sought by destroying, weakening, or inciting, and who among us thinks of helping little men in terms of tearing down big men?

And do Boetcker’s Cannots apply to Montana’s current political and legislative challenges? If, for example, a bill is introduced to establish a state-based earned income tax credit for the working poor in Montana by repealing the section of SB 407 (passed by the Legislature in 2003) that gave $30,500 in average annual tax relief to the wealthiest 1,586 households in the state, would that constitute “destroying” the rich to help the poor?

Though Boetcker’s Cannots make useful ideological grist, each one presents rich opportunity for gaming, for juxtaposing words and unveiling contradiction. You cannot construct sound public policy through the use of truisms.

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.” (Abraham Lincoln. Really.)