FDR did NOT say “In politics, nothing happens by accident.”
Monday, September 21, 2009
In a column at WorldNetDaily, Marylou Barry quoted the 32nd President:
“In politics there are no accidents,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said. “If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.”
Barry does not provide a source or a citation for this quote. In fact, her wording is a paraphrase of a more common variation on the quote. And curiously, no one who quotes FDR as making this statement seems to know where or when he said it. An odd omission, given that a Google search for “In politics nothing happens by accident” + roosevelt produces 54,000 results.
Research into uses of the statement or variations thereof don’t immediately produce any instances prior to the 1970s. Not a good sign for a quote attributed to a man who died in 1945. Rather, the earliest use is found in the 1971 conspiracy theory book None Dare Call it Conspiracy, by Gary Allen and Larry Abraham.
From the second page of Chapter 1:
FDR once said “In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.” He was in a good position to know. We believe that many of the major world events that are shaping our destinies occur because somebody or , somebodies have planned them that way.
And from Chapter 2:
Every conspirator has two things in common with every other conspirator. He must be an accomplished liar and a far-seeing planner. Whether you are studying Hitler, Alcibiades, Julius Caesar or some of our contemporary conspirators, you will find that their patient planning is almost overwhelming. We repeat FDR’s statement: “In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.”
Neither usage is sourced or footnoted. And with no earlier usage located thus far, it is curiously convenient that the first appearance of a conspiracy-endorsing statement attributed to FDR should have been in a conspiracy-endorsing book. As such, the evidence strongly suggests that this quote’s attribution to Franklin Delano Roosevelt is bogus.