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December 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEWS: 'Past Imperfect' Covers Complexities of History, Plagiarism Issues; 'His Excellency' Reveals George Washington's Accomplishments
Reviewed by David M. Kinchen
Editor, Huntington News Netowrk
HISTORY, n. An account
mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought
about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.
-- Ambrose Bierce, (1842-1914?) American writer, Civil
War veteran, in “The Devil’s Dictionary”
No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read. -- David McCullough, (1933 -- ) best-selling American biographer and historian
History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today. -- Henry Ford, Industrialist, anti-Semite (1863-1947)
Behind every great fortune there is a crime. – Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)
Plagiarize, let no one’s work evade your eyes…but please to call it research. – Tom Lehrer, mathematician, song writer (1928 --) From “The Lobachevsky Song.”
Hinton (HNN)
-- If you think writing history is simply a matter of putting
down facts and dates on paper, “Past Imperfect”
by Peter Charles Hoffer (PublicAffairs, $26, 287 pages) will
quickly disabuse you of this silly notion.
Hoffer, a professor of history at the University of Georgia,
is also on the American Historical Society’s professional
division, which audits history books by academic historians.
The first part of this very readable book describes how early historians such as George Bancroft and Francis Parkman and Woodrow Wilson – yes, he was a historian before he became President – chose facts that fit their consensus form of history.
Following a long reign of consensus history, which glorified the “City on the Hill” aspect of America, there developed in the last decades of the 20th Century what might be called radical or “new” history, which challenged just about everything the traditional historians believed.
Instead of a WASP-centric history that ignored women, Native Americans, slaves and just about everyone who wasn’t part of the establishment, the new historians – many of them 1960s radicals and war protesters -- vehemently attacked that establishment and literally rewrote history as we know it. The second part of Hoffer’s book examines the alleged plagiarism or falsification indulged in by four contemporary historians: Stephen Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Bellesiles and Joseph J. Ellis.
Almost the same time “Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud --American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin” landed on my front porch, I received a review copy of “His Excellency: George Washington” by Joseph J. Ellis (Knopf, $26.95, 352 pages). Talk about timing! I had reviewed his biography of Thomas Jefferson, “American Sphinx,” when it was published by Knopf in 1997.
I’m not a big fan of Jefferson, but I thought Ellis had written an outstanding biography of this puzzling Founding Father. I faulted his glossing over the Sally Hemings issue, but he later stated that it was almost certain Hemings was his mistress and bore him children. Hoffer deals with this flip-flopping over Hemings.
All this was before Ellis had been caught embellishing his military record while teaching a class at Mount Holyoke College, by saying he was a combat veteran of Vietnam (he wasn’t) and a football star in high school in northern Virginia (he wasn’t). It came out in 2001 that Ellis had spent his three years in the Army teaching history at West Point; he never scored the winning touchdown in a critical game.
Right after I finished reading the two books, I saw the excellent movie “Shattered Glass,” detailing how Stephen Glass falsified more than two dozen articles for two separate editors—Michael Kelly and Chuck Lane—at The New Republic in the late 1990s. Having written for newspapers and magazines—as well as the Internet – over a period of almost 40 years — I was intrigued by the movie, which was also relevant to this column. Even with diligent fact-checkers—standard equipment at most magazines, but totally absent at publishing houses – it is possible to fabricate stories as Glass did.
All four of the historians examined by Hoffer in “Past Imperfect” were guilty of plagiarism or fraud or both, he says, with Ambrose and Goodwin the biggest offenders, although Hoffer found fault with “Arming America” by Bellesiles and carelessness in attribution by Ellis.
Just as Glass made up readable quotes and scenes—and even whole stories that fooled his editors and the fact-checkers at TNR, so did the four popular historians try to reach a large audience outside the world of academia. New Orleans-based Ambrose (“Band of Brothers,” “D-Day,” “Undaunted Courage”) came closest to achieving widespread fame and fortune as a popular historian. Ambrose died at the age of 66 in 2002; before his death he admitted that many of his books contained material borrowed from other authors—without credit. In my book, this is plagiarism.
Doris Kearns Goodwin also “borrowed” from other authors, including Joseph Lash. Bellesiles attempted to break out of the academic ghetto with his book that purported to show that widespread gun ownership was not common in early America. Hoffer details how his selective use of facts distorted the reality that gun ownership was much more common than Bellesiles, a professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta, portrayed in “Arming America.”
After his facts were disputed, Bellesiles resigned from Emory, Hoffer relates in “Past Imperfect.” Knopf, which had published “Arming America” in 2000, declined to issue a quality paperback issue -- common practice in the publishing industry. A thorough reading of “Past Imperfect” is worth the effort for any writer who wants to avoid even inadvertent plagiarism. It’s worthy of a permanent place on any writer’s bookshelf.
What does Henry Ford have to do with the two books, let alone Balzac? Ford, through his publication of the notorious anti-Semitic forgery from Czarist Russia, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” spread poison much worse than the “bunk” he referred to in his 1916 statement. Balzac’s statement can apply to history, at least as interpreted by the “new” historians, if we just substitute “country” for “fortune.” I put in the Tom Lehrer quote because I’m a big fan of the satirical song writer and because, as an academic, Lehrer is probably familiar with colleagues who’ve plagiarized.
So, did I like “His Excellency?” In a word: “yes.” It covers the essentials, without getting the reader bogged down in details that don’t carry the story forward. It shows the faults of Washington, including his participation in a senseless murder of a captive while serving during the French and Indian War in the 1750s. Washington, like a recent presidential candidate, found it just as easy to fall in love with a rich woman as a poor one: Martha Dandridge Custis was probably the richest widow in Virginia when Washington proposed to her. He was a land baron, with extensive holdings in what later became West Virginia, and he was quick to prosecute those who squatted on his land.
Washington was also the one essential founding father, Ellis says, with much documentation. The tall Virginian had limited formal education, but he had both street smarts and street cred. And Washington did something Jefferson never did: He freed his slaves. Not the dower slaves Martha Dandridge Custis brought to the marriage -- the ones he owned.
Despite the famous saying of F. Scott
Fitzgerald about there being “no second acts in American
lives,” I think the maxim is far from true and I hope
so in Ellis’s case. His writing is accessible to the
general reader and he manages to produce history that is neither
consensus nor “new” but still combines elements
of both. As a dedicated fan of history, I welcome books like
“His Excellency” and can recommend it without
hesitation.
More Book Reviews by David M. Kinchen
— 10/28/04 BOOK REVIEWS: Bill Kurtis on the Death Penalty; Ms. Moffett Becomes a Teacher
— 11/15/04 BOOK REVIEW: Roth Envisions a Frightening 'What If?' in 'The Plot Against America'
— 11/24/04 BOOK REVIEWS: Bush, Blair and Iraq; A Shrink at Nuremberg; Updike's Sexy Geek; Potomac Fever Smites an Academic
— 12/29/04 BOOK REVIEWS: ‘de Kooning’ Chronicles Rise of American Art Supremacy; ‘Adams vs. Jefferson’ Shows That Controversial Presidential Elections are Nothing New
— 01/17/05 BOOK REVIEW: Max Hastings on Germany's 'Armageddon' as Allies from West,
East Conquer Third Reich
— 01/24/05 BOOK REVIEW: ‘Images of America: Huntington’ Displays Glorious Architecture of West Virginia’s First Planned City
— 01/27/05 BOOK REVIEW: ‘Auschwitz’ Personalizes Horror That Should Never Be Forgotten
David M. Kinchen is the Editor of HuntingtonNews.Net, repsponses and article submissions can be made to .
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