The Decline of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations

by John I. Johnson

YESTERDAY I picked up a used copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (16th ed., 1992). Unfortunately, it was edited by Justin Kaplan (pictured), and incorporates vast amounts of Jewish, non-White, anti-White, and pop culture swill.

(Two good ones “attributed” — that is, technically unverified — were from Cary Grant: 1) His response to a telegraphed query, “How old Cary Grant?”: “Old Cary Grant fine. How you?”; 2) “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.”)

In his memoir Back Then (2002) Kaplan wrote of the atmosphere in the already very Jewish publishing world of the 1950s, even bragging a bit of Jewish “enjoyment” of White women:

“It was fun to work at Simon & Schuster. [It was] not surprising to see editors staying long after hours to talk books, trade industry gossip, and joke over office bottles of Scotch and gin. In the days before it was absorbed into a conglomerate the house was like a summer camp for intellectually hyperactive children,” only without a curfew, reminiscing about dancing at a party with Marilyn Monroe, “gently kneading the little tire of baby fat around her waist.”

Interestingly, around this same time Kaplan met and married Anne Bernays (b. 1930), daughter of propaganda expert and the inventor of “public relations,” Edward L. Bernays. She was also the great-niece of Sigmund Freud.

Kaplan includes lots of arrogant, sneering stuff in his edition of Bartlett’s, like this supposed defense of Nixon’s proposed appointment of the Left-demonized Judge G. Harrold Carswell (whom Kaplan won’t even dignify with the title “Judge”) to the Supreme Court in 1970 by Czech-American Sen. Roman Hruska (R.-Neb.) (whom Kaplan refuses to label “Senator”):

“Even if he’s mediocre, there are lots of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance? We can’t all have Brandeises, Cardozos and Frankfurters and stuff like that there.”

The latter all happen to be Jewish, of course.

Since Kaplan doesn’t provide specific citations to his sources in many instances (including this one), it would require an army of revisionists to even begin to test the accuracy of his many tendentious and racist inclusions.

Interestingly, Kaplan usually allocates explicit anti-White expressions to non-Jews: Blacks, Indians, and so on. Famous anti-White quotes by Jews like Elie Wiesel and Susan Sontag are omitted from their entries.

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