Republicans truly love to keep reminding everybody that they are the party of the great Abraham Lincoln, which is true. But after recent reports, they might want to do a little more research on their iconic idol, because just recently, the GOP Twitter account just tweeted a fake Abraham Lincoln quote.
GOP Tweeting Fake Lincoln Quote
"And in the end, it's not the years in your life that counts. It's the life in your years," the quote reads, attributing it to the 16th and one of the most popularly well-known President of the United States. According to Gizmodo, the tweet was sent out along with a "Happy Birthday" greeting for the President.
Real Origin Of The Quote
The only problem is that President Lincoln never said this quote; in fact, the quote probably originated from the 1940s. As noted by several investigators, a version of the quote was probably first uttered by a certain medical doctor named Edward J. Stieglitz, which was quoted in the Chicago Tribune in 1947.
Investigators have tracked the quote in a blog post from 2012, showing how it actually morphed and is attributed to a lot of different people throughout the second half of the 20th century. By the 1980s, quotation books were saying that it also originated with politician Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. Senator from Illinois at that time.
How They Got It All Wrong
According to TheHuffingtonPost, the earliest person to connect the quote to Abraham Lincoln might be in a book from 1997 called "God's Abundance" by Kathy Collard Miller. Though possible, if not probable, that Miller wasn't the first, either way, it seems that the shift towards attributing the quote to Lincoln most likely occurred sometime in the 90s.
It's also very much certain and possible that the quote even predated way back 1947, but one thing is certain, that there's absolutely no evidence Lincoln ever said it. But now with Donald Trump in charge, the GOP doesn't seem too concerned these days with hiring fact checkers.
