In mocking the GOP, Odumbo cited an anecdote about President Hayes [BTW, General Hayes was a Civil War veteran who actively engaged in the fight against slavery] in which, upon using the telephone for the first time, Hayes 'purportedly'* said, “It’s a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?”
“That’s why he’s not on Mount Rushmore,” Odumbo said. “He’s explaining why we can’t do something instead of why we can do something.”
But Nan Card, curator of manuscripts at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Ohio, told TPM that the nation’s 19th president was being unfairly tagged as a Luddite.
“Hayes really was the opposite,” she said. “He had the first telephone in the White House. He also had the first typewriter in the White House. Thomas Edison came to the White House as well and displayed the phonograph. Photographing people who came to the White House and visited at dinners and receptions was also very important to him.”
*While often cited, Card said Odumbo’s cited quote had never been confirmed by contemporary sources and is likely apocryphal. A contemporary newspaper account of his first experience with telephone in 1877 from the Providence Journal records a smiling Hayes repeatedly responding to the voice on the other line with the phrase, “That is wonderful.”
. . . . There's more after that—and keep in mind, this isn't Odumbo displaying his ignorance in off-the-cuff remarks. This was from a prepared speech—which means that a truckload of people reviewed it, edited it, and approved it. It's just that no one bothered to fact-check it.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/...ng_633962.html
