Dear George,

It should be pointed out that our Italian sister city Poggio a Caiano is proud of more than just the fact that their leading citizen Filippo Mazzei was friends with Thomas Jefferson. They claim Mazzei was the originator of the phrase, "all men are created equal."

They teach their schoolchildren this--I've seen the comic books they use to educate their kids about the connections between Jefferson and Mazzei, the American Revolution and Tuscany.

And there's a joint resolution of Congress from 1994, creating Italian-American Heritage month, that reads in part "Whereas the phrase in the Declaration of Independence "All men are created equal," was suggested by the Italian patriot and immigrant Philip Mazzei ..." Talk about things that make you go, "Hmmmm."

I read on Wikipedia that scholars dispute this attribution, but well ... they've been wrong about TJ before, haven't they?

Let me add that, if this is true, I don't think it makes Jefferson a plagiarist. Plagiarism implies an intent to defraud, a hoped-for financial or professional gain that would otherwise be out of reach. But this sounds like sharing not stealing. Jefferson and Mazzei shared political philosophies; Jefferson translated some of Mazzei's arguments on rights into English; theirs was a strong intellectual intimacy of the type that he shared with many other thinkers and writers of his age. Obama and Deval Patrick sound like they have a similar relationship....

As a culture, we tend to revere the image of the lonely author pounding out works of genius in splendid solitude--but it's a total myth. Ezra Pound whacked "The Waste Land" into existence out of reams of virtually unreadable verse by the not-yet-famous T.S. Eliot. 99% of what passes for single-authored work in the media has been edited--sometimes quite drastically--and those other contributors never get credit. Sharing of ideas and swapping of phrases is routine--between friends and in most work situations, too.

I can't say anything more.... The temptation to criticize is very strong today.

Kendra Hamilton (Electronic mail, February 20, 2008)