Morey letter

The Morey letter was a forgery that appeared during the 1880 United States presidential election.

On October 20, 1880, the New York newspaper The Truth published a letter that was supposed to have been written by Republican presidential candidate James A. Garfield to an "H.L. Morey" of Lynn, Massachusetts.^[1] Purported to have been written in January of 1879, the letter—just three sentences written on congressional stationery—implied that Garfield favored unrestricted Chinese immigration. Chinese immigration was a controversial issue, and both Garfield and his Democratic opponent Winfield Scott Hancock were on record as being against further immigration.

Garfield initially made no comment on the letter, because he could not be sure whether he had written it. Reporters could find no person named H.L. Morey in Lynn. Once Garfield saw a copy of The Truth with a lithograph of the letter, he was sure it was not his own handwriting.^[1] On October 26 Garfield submitted a handwritten version of the letter, which was published in newspapers so readers could compare the handwriting and judge for themselves. Garfield went on to win the election.

The Morey letter was thought to be a forgery emanating from Democratic Party operatives and produced a backlash against the Democrats. While never proven, there was much public speculation at the time that journalist Stanley Huntley, of the Brooklyn Eagle and creator of the Spoopendyke humor stories, was the author of the Morey Letter. Huntley himself had made fun of the question of who wrote the letter in one of his stories.

External links

• Facsimile of the Morey letter from partisan source

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Gyory, Andrew. "The Phony Document that Almost Cost a President His Election History News Network, 25 October 2004.