User talk:DaveLeach

Welcome[edit]

Hello, DaveLeach, and welcome to Wikipedia. Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you are stuck, and looking for help, please come to the New contributors' help page, where experienced Wikipedians can answer any queries you have! Or, you can just type {{helpme}} and your question on your user talk page, and someone will show up shortly to answer. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

We hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! By the way, you can sign your name on talk and vote pages using four tildes, like this: ~~~~. If you have any questions, see the help pages, add a question to the village pump or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! --Fsotrain⁰⁹ 23:13, 28 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Please accept this invite to join the Conservatism WikiProject, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to conservatism.
Simply click here to accept! – Lionel ^(talk) 04:47, 8 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The problem with the "common thread"[edit]

I appreciate your desire to make the articles here richer. The problem with the section that you have added and apparently readded on Conservatism in the United States is that it has no reference for its claim, and thus appears to be original research. Wikipedia may seem a great place for placing new insight, but really it's not built for that; it exists for gathering information already established in reliable sources. So if what you're posting is that in your view that is the common thread, then Wikipedia is not the place for it, although there are plenty of fine places on the Web for putting forth your views. If what you're saying is that it's established fact that that is the common thread, then you will need to provide a source for folks to verify that it's established fact. --Nat Gertler (talk) 18:31, 8 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

@Dave - I moved your objection that you left on my talk page to Talk:Conservatism_in_the_United_States#Recent_revert (click the blue link and edit the section to add comments). Please continue the discussion there...

@Nat - I restored his edit to give him a chance to source it and gain experience in our procedures here in the spirit of DONTBITE. – Lionel ^(talk) 20:16, 8 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

DaveLeach (talk) 02:34, 9 July 2011 (UTC) Thanks. I'm adding cites. I offer no original research, unless you think reporting common knowledge (among conservativers) is "original research".[reply]

Anthem & Motto[edit]

The link between the Anthem and Motto [1] needs reliable, secondary sources, preferably from the 1860's. Assertions without proof are not Wikipedia material. Geographyinitiative (talk) 20:57, 21 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Response and resubmission[edit]

I appreciate knowing this was done. I have resubmitted the information but more carefully, and I explained on the talk page. On the main page I added:

"In God is our trust" is part of the fourth verse of The Star-Spangled Banner, written on September 4, 1814. It follows "Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation...And this be our motto:" "In God is our trust" is the verbiage which Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase changed to "In God We Trust" in his 1863 letter to the Philadelphia Mint before the latter phrase appeared on two-cent pieces the next year. (See left sidebar.)

On the talk page I explained:

The 1814 origin of the phrase Earlier this year I posted a link to the National Anthem article showing the phrase "In God is our trust" was part of its 4th verse. Recently it was deleted and this warning was posted at the beginning of the history section with code that made it appear only to editors:

DO NOT RESTORE any Star Spangled Banner content without reliable, secondary sources. There's no source yet identified that says the motto came from the anthem.

There is no source saying the motto came from the Canadian mounties, either, yet that heads the "history" section, illustrating the fact that a history of something ought to include all things which logically could have inspired the thing, or provided the germ of its idea, without having to prove that the creators of the thing in its final form verbally acknowledged all its historical predecessors - an obstacle that would erase most of human history. No evidence is cited that "In God we trust" on our 2-cent piece, either, was acknowledged by Congress in 1956 as where its action declaring it our official national motto "came from".

I reposted the information, but more carefully, noting that "in God is our trust" is the same verbiage which the left sidebar says was crossed out by a U.S. Treasury Secretary and changed to "In God We Trust", in his instructions to the U.S. Mint before the latter verbiage was added to our 2-cent piece.

I was tempted to further analyze the 4th verse by observing that the grammar of "and THIS BE our motto" indicates the composer felt it was already America's defacto motto in view of the widespread public acknowledgment of God at the time, or it may mean he was proposing that the phrase officially become our national motto. But I suppose that bit of reasoning would defy Wikipedia guidelines. --DaveLeach (talk) 17:16, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

I could have added that what we call our National Anthem was a very popular song in 1860. It wasn't sung just at football games.

Hello again. I understand that there is a similarity between the verse in the Star Spangled Banner and the motto of the USA. But the problem is, I can't find ANYTHING saying that in 1860 when they were considering this motto, that ANYONE made a connection between the Star Spangled Banner song and the motto. If you can find a good source (or two) from the 19th or 20th century that says that ANYBODY made this connection, then I will accept adding this onto the page. If you don't have that source, then I think this could be coincidental. You've got to imagine that if someone drew a direct connection between the Star Spangled Banner and In God we trust in the 1860s, someone would have said something. You've got to imagine that if the US Congress thought that the motto came from the Star Spangled Banner, someone would have mentioned it when the US Congress made the Star Spangled Banner the US national anthemn in the 1930s. But I can't find ANYTHING that says anyone connected these two concepts. All I can find is 21st century internet rumors that there is a connection. In order to add the content you added here: [2] you MUST add a real, scholarly source or a source where someone from the 19th or 20th century, or a scholar from the 21st century, says "yeah, according to my scholarly analysis/ first hand knowledge of period documents, Salmon Chase was reading the Star Spangled Banner one day and decided to use the motto in that song as the US motto/ the US Congress recognized that the Star Spangled Banner seemed to be talking about the US motto." or something similar. We have to differentiate Wikipedia from online rumour mills, and the way to do that is to demand sources for all facts on all the pages. Let me know what you think about what I'm saying.

I'm not blind. I can see that there is some kind of connection between the fourth verse of the Star Spangled Banner and the US motto. The question is: is the connection a coincidence, or did people know that there was a connection back in the pre-internet days. If they didn't know, then it's a coincidence. I will keep working on this and let you know. Geographyinitiative (talk) 02:33, 27 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I finally found a connection in the literature between the Star Spangled Banner and the US national motto! Apparently in 1956, they used the Star Spangled Banner as part of their justification to make 'In God We Trust' the national motto of the US. Pretty cool huh? See if you like what I did on the page. Geographyinitiative (talk) 12:01, 27 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Wow! Thanks! Fascinating! Actually I don't have an account at Heinonline so I couldn't read your cite. Apparently I can't get an account unless I am a current student or professor at a university. Perhaps if I dug I could find it in the Congressional Record - a project I did not think about before. But wow!

I still fail to understand why the connection I posted was insufficient to justify inclusion in the article, although the more corroboration of a point, the more wonderful it is.

The reason I still question its necessity is that the heading is not "the origin of Congress' official designation of 'In God We Trust' as the U.S. National Motto", but rather the heading is simply "history", and the article title is simply "In God We Trust". Therefore, I would think ANY historical record of the phrase, even if it were in the Koran or the B'hagavad Gita, would have been appropriate, even if it were proved that Congress emphatically did NOT know about or even respect that source. Surely that is the rationale for listing the Canadian use of the phrase in the article! Surely, as I pointed out, the Congressional discussion that you cited does not mention the Canadian use! (Makes me wish I had a Heinonline account so I wouldn't have to guess. Or the time to search through the Congressional Record.)

But thank you so much for your investigation! And also for teaching me that I can use a colon in wiki software to indent a paragraph! DaveLeach (talk) 17:05, 27 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]