Like lots of Americans, I tuned in Wednesday afternoon to hear Kamala Harris’ belated concession speech. I had low expectations for what she was going to say, but the spectacle of Harris graciously conceding to a man she had very recently warned was an incipient fascist was too jarring not to witness.
Anyway, I found the speech pretty innocuous and unmemorable right up until the very end when, rallying the crowd for something resembling a rousing conclusion, she said this:
There’s an adage a historian once called a law of history, true of every society across the ages. The adage is, only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. I know many people feel like we are entering a dark time, but for the benefit of us all, I hope that is not the case. But here’s the thing, America, if it is, let us fill the sky with the light of a brilliant, brilliant billion of stars.
Initially what gave me pause was that, while the rest of the speech had been inoffensive pablum, this was just terrible writing. Even by the standards of speechwriting in modern politics, this jumps out as uniquely bad. Why would this trite metaphor about stars be a “law of history”? And man, I hope “the light of a brilliant, brilliant billion of stars” wasn’t the actual text of the speech, because that’s not even grammatical. It was so bad that I wonder if she wrote it herself.
But one of the main things that bothered me was the provenance of the supposed quote from a “historian.” When I griped about this passage on X, an old friend immediately wondered whether this was a misattribution of a well known Martin Luther King, Jr. quote. In his famous “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech, MLK did say something almost verbatim: “But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”
But if the first black woman to run for president wanted to quote MLK, why not just say it was MLK? Further, MLK is a lot of things, but I’ve never heard him called a “historian” — to refer to him that way would just honestly be confusing, especially to an audience of faithful Democrats, at Howard University no less, who are probably very familiar with well-known MLK sayings.
Of course, a lot of MLK’s better known lines didn’t necessarily originate with him. MLK didn’t exactly attribute these lines the way he should have, but he didn’t hide the fact he was borrowing, either. And it’s pretty well known that MLK was fond of quoting Charles Beard, a well-known historian in the early 20th century.
It’s hard to get much context on this, because Beard has slipped mostly into obscurity and the references here mostly survive in old journals and academic papers, but Charles Beard was known for a handful of aphorisms he called the “Four Laws of Political Science”:
- The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine.
- Those whom the gods are about to destroy they first make mad.
- When it gets dark enough you can see the stars.
- The bee fertilizes the flower that it robs.
Not exactly “laws of history,” but close enough. Case closed, right? Well, no. While I’ve spent some time reverse engineering this, I have to credit L0m3z for pointing out the quote really originates with Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle:
Carlyle’s original quote was less exact: “The eternal stars shine out again, as soon as it is dark enough.” Regardless, according to the website Quote Investigator, in a published paper Beard himself attributed his own take on the aphorism directly to Carlyle: “In conclusion we may say, with Carlyle, when it grows dark enough we can see stars.”
Why does this matter? Well, if you poke around you’ll see that Carlyle was reviled for much of the 20th century as the illiberal “prophet of fascism.” Oh and then there’s this:
In his waning days, defeated and surrounded only by loyalists in his bunker, Hitler sought consolation from the literature he admired the most. According to many biographers, the following scene took place. Hitler turned to Goebbels, his trusted assistant, and asked for a final reading. The words he chose to hear before his death were from Thomas Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great.
Now to be fair to Carlyle, like a lot of influential intellectuals, he was a lot more complex and nuanced than his critics make him out to be. He’s probably better known as the originator of the “great man of history” theory than for his supposed fascism, though a lot of people contentiously argue that the former leads to the latter. His reputation has been rehabbed somewhat since the mid-20th century when he was more reviled, but he’s exactly the kind of figure that woke academics extend almost no grace toward. (And that’s without even getting into his 19th century views on race.)
Anyway, the long and short of it is that, while Kamala Harris was graciously conceding her electoral loss to a man she had insincerely warned was dangerous fascist, she tried to soothe her supporter’s souls by, however inadvertently, quoting one of Hitler’s favorite historians. Absolute perfection.
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