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From: Bruce.Tindall@launchpad.unc.edu (Bruce Tindall)
Subject: Re: Coopersmith (SERIOUS URBAN FOLKLORE REFERENCES)
Date: 14 Sep 1993 00:26:25 GMT

Attention serious Wittgenstein and UL fans. The Joshua Coopersmith story was the inspiration for perhaps the first AFU-like FAQ-like document in print -- in 1933! There's also a little bashing of lawyer-bashers involved.

William Chauncey Langdon was librarian of the American Telephone Historical Collection. According to the editor of _Bell Telephone Quarterly_, Vol XII (1933), "His primary interest has been in reporting what the records show, but he has naturally also been interested in noting how var these stories have travelled away from the facts, and how it was that they have reached their present form and character." And this while Dr. Brunvand was still a baby in a Skinner box!

Langdon introduces his article on Coopersmith and other telephone UL's: "...Mankind is often chary of the facts, content to get along with a few of them instead of anxious for all of them. Even, or especially, in the immutable realm of the past, we are prone to feel that what we think ought to have been, was so. This is essentially the trouble with much written history. An imaginative statement once invented and promulgated, the present purposes and immediate interests of active life and business bring their pressure to bear in its favor. In this way are many myths born. For the rest, we glide care-free back through the past"

[Uh, didn't Fitzgerald say that? --BMT] "seeing things indiscriminately, some of which like the Ichthyosaurus have come and gone through evolution, and some of more purely mythical character have come and stayed."

Now Langdon goes into the Coopersmith story specifically: "Among the best authenticated instances of telephone myths stands the pathetic figure of Joshua Coopersmith. Joshua had a clever father, whoever he was. The son is plausible in form, and he still wanders up and down the land, doing odd jobs filling space in worthy periodicals. ...Naturally no one of his editorial sponsors has thus far been able to cite for verification the name of the newspaper and the date on which the news of Joshua Coopersmith was first printed, but this it may be unreasonable to ask."

Langdon raises these objections to the story: "There are a number of little slips in this story to arouse suspicion. ... The man is said to have exhibited the device. Why then would not a simple demonstration have either confirmed the charge or justified the defendant? But the appeal is rather to the indefinite 'well-informed.' On analysis, as often proves to be the case, the real implication is against the Press and the Courts, the one for apprehending and the other for demanding long imprisonment on a charge that any way you look at it will not hold water." So we see that citizens and Citizens alike engaged in lawyer-bashing even before misc.legal.raving-loons existed.

I recommend the whole article, reprinted in George Shiers, ed., _The Telephone: An Historical Anthology_ (New York: Arno Press, 1977).