Not Alexander Woollcott — earliest traced to Peter FlemingPeter Fleming1907–1971 · British travel writer · Quote Investigator’s leading candidate, not a settled attribution
This is a floating quip, not a Woollcott line. Quote Investigator ↗ locates its earliest known use in a letter Peter Fleming wrote on 29 September 1929 — about Long Island, not about anybody’s house — and its earliest publication in The Fortnightly Review of June 1933, where the writer credited only an unnamed wag. The Woollcott credit surfaces once, in Moss Hart’s memoir Act One (1959), in different wording, sixteen years after Woollcott’s death; the earlier estate version, printed by Frank Case in 1940, puts the line in the mouth of a different man with a confusingly similar name, Wolcott Gibbs.
“This Just Shows What God Could Do If He Had Money” not Alexander Woollcott. A floating quip with no settled author: the earliest known use is Peter Fleming's letter of 29 September 1929 (printed in Duff Hart-Davis, Peter Fleming: A Biography, 1974), and the earliest publication is an anonymous credit in The Fortnightly Review, June 1933. Frank Case's Do Not Disturb (1940) gives the estate version to Wolcott Gibbs; the Woollcott credit appears only in Moss Hart's Act One (1959), in different wording. Chronology via Quote Investigator.
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Alexander Woollcott. Use the credit shown above instead.
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Evoking the world of Peter Fleming — British travel writer, Times correspondent & elder brother of Ian Fleming. Theme: "This Just Shows What God Could Do If He Had Money". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
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Provenance
Where the line actually comes from
Earliest known use
Letter, Peter Fleming to Rupert Hart-Davis, 29 September 1929, from the Piping Rock Club, Locust Valley
Printed in
Peter Fleming: A Biography (Duff Hart-Davis, 1974), p. 67
Earliest publication
The Fortnightly Review, London, June 1933 — Ivor Brown, crediting only an unnamed wag
Source of the Woollcott credit
Act One: An Autobiography (Moss Hart, Random House, 1959), pp. 27–28
Finally, returning to the house after inspection of the domain, the owner points to a magnificent elm growing in the terrace just outside the library window. “See that tree? That tree stood for fifty years or more on top of that hill over there. I had it moved down here so on pleasant mornings I can do my work out here in its shade.” “That just shows what God could do if he had money,” says Gibbs.
Frank Case, Do Not Disturb (1940)
This is the earliest printing of the estate anecdote in essentially the popular wording — and the speaker is Wolcott Gibbs, not Alexander Woollcott. The joke itself is older: Peter Fleming used it about Long Island as a whole in a letter four years before it first reached print, anonymously, in 1933.
1929 — the earliest known use, and it is not about a house. Peter Fleming wrote from Long Island that the place “represents the Americans’ idea of what God would have done with Nature if he’d had the money.” The letter is dated 29 September 1929 and is printed in Duff Hart-Davis’s biography of Fleming; the chronology is assembled by Quote Investigator ↗.
1933 — first in print, with nobody’s name on it. Quote Investigator’s earliest published evidence is a June 1933 article by the drama critic Ivor Brown in the London periodical The Fortnightly Review, which used the line — “It’s what God would have done with Nature, if He had had the money” — and credited an unnamed wag ↗.
1940 — the joke shrinks to one estate, and gets a speaker. Frank Case, the Algonquin proprietor, printed the transplanted-elm anecdote in Do Not Disturb and gave the punchline to Wolcott Gibbs of The New Yorker ↗.
1959 — Woollcott’s name is attached, posthumously. Moss Hart’s Act One (Random House, 1959) ↗ credits “the late Alexander Woollcott” with “Just what God would have done if He had the money” — a different wording, published sixteen years after Woollcott died in 1943 and twenty-six years after the line was already in print without him.
No public-domain claim is made here, because the wording cannot be tied to a specific work. The earliest located instance is an unpublished 1929 letter that did not reach print until Duff Hart-Davis’s biography of Peter Fleming in 1974, and every documented printing of the line — The Fortnightly Review (1933), Frank Case’s Do Not Disturb (1940), Moss Hart’s Act One (1959) — falls after 1931 and belongs to its own author and publisher. The quip as a floating one-liner has no identifiable rights holder; the books that contain it do.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Five men have been handed this line
None of the credits below is supported by a contemporary record of the speaker saying it. Each is a later retelling that fixed the joke to a particular house and a particular guest — and the joke is older than all of them.
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The popular creditAlexander Woollcott Single late memoir
The only source is Moss Hart’s Act One (1959), where Hart writes that after he built needless wings on his country house and planted thousands of trees, “the late Alexander Woollcott was prompted to remark a little contemptuously, ‘Just what God would have done if He had the money.’” That is not the popular wording, it is a recollection published sixteen years after Woollcott’s death in 1943 ↗, and the joke was already in print — unattributed — by 1933. The Woollcott form still circulates locally: the Michener Art Museum’s Bucks County artists database ↗ repeats it about Hart’s Fairview Farm in Solebury Township.
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The rival creditWolcott Gibbs Name collision
Nineteen years before Hart’s memoir, Algonquin proprietor Frank Case gave the estate anecdote to the New Yorker writer Wolcott Gibbs in Do Not Disturb (1940) — and that version carries almost exactly the popular wording. Quote Investigator flags the obvious hazard, noting that misattributions are generated when credit shifts between people with similar names, “e.g., between Wolcott Gibbs and Alexander Woollcott” ↗. Gibbs is the earlier claimant, but he is not the originator either.
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A 1946 newspaper tellingBrooks Atkinson Floating credit
A 1946 Boston Herald item put the remark at Moss Hart’s farm and gave it to the New York Times drama critic Brooks Atkinson, in the form “This shows what God could do if He only had money” — same house, different guest, per Quote Investigator’s chronology ↗.
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A 1964 second-hand versionGeorge S. Kaufman Third-hand
A Dallas columnist in 1964 reported Kitty Carlisle’s version of the story, which credited Hart’s writing partner George S. Kaufman: “God would have done the same if he had had the money” — recorded by Quote Investigator ↗.
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The San Simeon versionGeorge Bernard Shaw Apocryphal
The line is built to travel. It needs only a rich man, a landscape he has improved, and a guest sharp enough to say the obvious thing — so it re-attaches itself to whatever estate and whatever wit are in front of the teller. Fleming aimed it at the whole of Long Island in 1929. By 1933 The Fortnightly Review was using it about Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s spectacular Shakespeare productions and crediting nobody. By 1940 it had narrowed to a single house, a single transplanted elm, and a single named speaker.
Once it narrowed, the names began to rotate. Frank Case gave it to Wolcott Gibbs; a 1946 newspaper gave it to Brooks Atkinson; Moss Hart gave it to Alexander Woollcott; a 1964 columnist relayed Kitty Carlisle’s version crediting George S. Kaufman; and by 1971 it had been handed to George Bernard Shaw standing in Hearst’s San Simeon. Every one of those men is plausible, which is exactly the problem — a quip that fits any wit will eventually be attributed to all of them.
A joke that fits any estate will sooner or later be credited to every wit who ever visited one.
The two names that keep swapping
Wolcott Gibbs and Alexander Woollcott overlapped at The New Yorker, and Quote Investigator names this pairing outright as an example of how credit drifts between people with similar names. Wikipedia records that the two were frequently confused or assumed to be related ↗ despite not being relatives — and that Gibbs privately loathed Woollcott, calling him one of the most dreadful writers who ever existed.
Moss Hart’s own telling is worth reading in full, because it is not a boast. He is describing his own extravagance: he had built needless wings on his country house and planted thousands of trees, and records that “the late Alexander Woollcott was prompted to remark a little contemptuously” — the joke was at Hart’s expense, which is one reason it has stuck to his farm ever since.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1907–1971 · British travel writer, Times correspondent & elder brother of Ian Fleming
Peter Fleming was a British travel writer, journalist and adventurer best known for Brazilian Adventure (1933) and News from Tartary (1936), and for his work as a special correspondent for The Times. He was the elder brother of Ian Fleming, and wrote essays for The Spectator under the pen name “Strix.” His 1929 letter from Long Island is the earliest instance of this joke anyone has located — though as Quote Investigator is careful to say, he either crafted the remark or was relaying a witticism already circulating on Long Island.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Best available documentation
Earliest known instance: Peter Fleming to Rupert Hart-Davis, letter of 29 September 1929, quoted in Duff Hart-Davis, Peter Fleming: A Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974), 67. Earliest publication: Ivor Brown, The Fortnightly Review (London), June 1933. Estate version: Frank Case, Do Not Disturb (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1940), 276. Woollcott credit: Moss Hart, Act One: An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1959), 27–28. Chronology: “Quote Origin: This Just Shows What God Could Do If He Had Money,” Quote Investigator, 26 December 2014.
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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘This Just Shows What God Could Do If He Had Money’?” Last verified 8 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/this-just-shows-what-god-could-do-if-he-had-money/