Joseph Nathan Kane - Interviews and Reports

Interviews and Reports

Kane passed on some of his philosophy to an interviewer for Current Biography who was gathering information for his article. He told the interviewer that at elementary school he would often ask a teacher when they had made a "factual" statement, "How do you know? And that was usually the end of the discussion."}} Kane pointed out to the interviewer that when he worked for the Jewish Press he interviewed famous people because he was, "trying to shed light on facts generally unknown".

Kane told another reporter that while getting his higher education the professors would assign certain books for the students to read. He would read something else, "I did not like to play follow-the-leader in education. If everyone was forced to read The Merchant of Venice, I would read Twelfth Night. Those professors were wrong when quoting facts and, besides that, I had read most of the books at the Columbia University Library before I entered Columbia."

Kane once told a reporter for The Associated Press, "I'm stupid enough not to believe anything until I see the proof."

Kane interviewing for an article for Liberty (December 1938) told the interviewer that, "Nobody knew who did it first. The credit always seemed to go to the inventor with the best publicity agent. The little man, too engrossed in his beloved work to advertise his exploits, was simply lost in the shuffle.

Kane pointed out in publishing his books that he was not attempting, "to remold public conceptions, but merely to present impartial facts and thus to replace romantic history with commonplace truth. Whenever rival claims have been put forth the one best substantiated has been given credence. Only those 'firsts' for which there are definite records are included; it is possible that further research into hitherto unpublished records may disclose additional data."

A reporter for The Times wrote, "The doyen of trivialists, factualists and know-it-alls. Kane regarded himself as a debunker, a campaigner against myth and historical complacency.