Confucius valued careful and serious speech. One passage in the Analects says that a person can be judged as wise or unwise on the basis of a single sentence. So how is it possible that for many Americans, the first thing they think of when they hear the name of the Chinese teacher is “Confucius say,” followed by a silly one-liner?
It turns out the trend can be precisely dated. In the late 1930s, a newspaper columnist named Walter Winchell began attributing some satirical statements to Confucius, and soon the device was picked up by radio hosts like Jack Benny. From there it spread rapidly, so that as this remarkable story from a February 1940 edition of Life magazine tells us, “In every city and village from coast to coast last week, Americans were stopping other Americans and chortling, ‘You know what Confucius say?'” Many major newspapers began to carry a “Confucius say” column with content solicited from readers, sheets with the maxims were sold in Times Square, and there was a popular song with the title recorded by Guy Lombardo.
As far as I know (and please correct me if I’m wrong), this was the first time Confucius was introduced into mass American culture. This first impression seems to have stuck with us, so that “Confucius say,” despite not only its inaccuracy but also its extreme offensiveness, is ubiquitous even today. I hear it from students, in email forwards from colleagues, and even occasionally in news commentary. (Anyone can get a sense of its pervasiveness by doing a Google image search.) I can’t help but think that this popular caricature may be in some measure responsible for the prejudice in American academic philosophy against Chinese thought– but that is the subject of another post.
A few things I’d be interested to hear about from this blog’s readership. If you have studied or taught Chinese philosophy in the U.S, what has been your experience with “Confucius say”? How do you respond to it when you hear it? What do you think is the best way to counter this impression of Confucius in the your students’ imaginations?