Little George Washington chops down his father's cherry tree, gets confronted, and confesses with the immortal line, 'I cannot tell a lie.' It is the founding parable of American honesty, taught to schoolchildren for two centuries as proof that the first president was incapable of fibbing.
It was made up. The cherry-tree story does not appear anywhere in Washington's lifetime; it was invented by a biographer and bookseller named Mason Locke Weems, who added it to the fifth edition of his Washington biography around 1806, several years after Washington's death, specifically to give children an uplifting moral. There is no diary, letter, or contemporary account of any cherry tree or any 'I cannot tell a lie'. Weems was a salesman who knew a good yarn shifts copies, and this one shifted a lot. The irony is hard to miss: the most famous story about Washington's honesty is a fabrication. The real Washington was an impressive and complicated man who, like everyone, told the occasional untruth. Just not, as far as anyone can prove, about a tree.