HISTORIANS IN TROUBLE: Plagiarism, Fraud and Politics in the Ivory Tower
By JON WIENER
The New Press, 2005, 260 pp, $39.95 (hb)
Review by Phil Shannon
When the Californian Congressman, Richard Nixon, unmasked Alger Hiss, a State Department official, in 1948 as a Russian spy by dramatically extracting a roll of microfilm allegedly placed by Hiss in a hollowed-out pumpkin, the post-war anti-communist crusade was off and running. There were, said a grave Nixon to the TV cameras, spies high up in the government. Or so it seemed.
Hiss defenders and Hiss accusers had argued the toss over Hiss ever since due to the lack of corroborating evidence, until a new book by the historian, Allen Weinstein, in 1978 appeared to seal the case against Hiss. But, as Jon Wiener argues in his fascinating book on scholarly scandals, Weinstein’s book was just another (dubious) move, not checkmate, by conservatives in the battle over Alger Hiss.
Weinstein was caught out by one reviewer who located Weinstein’s six key interviewees whose interviews all allegedly went to prove the credibility of the ex-Communist, Whittaker Chambers, who had fingered Hiss and joined Nixon in the stage-managed pumpkin patch incident. All six interviewees, however, said they had been either misquoted, misrepresented or misconstrued by Weinstein. The book’s thesis that Chambers was a credible witness and therefore, by extension, that Hiss was guilty, was damaged.
Despite repeated promises, Professor Weinstein has never made the original interview tapes available to all researchers, without favour, to check his accuracy and interpretation. This abrogation of professional responsibility has thus compromised the leading work claiming to prove the guilt of Hiss, whose criminal conviction convinced many Americans that domestic communism posed a real danger and kick-started an assault on civil liberties and the left.
Despite his refusal – for twenty-five years – to document that he did not misquote key interviewees, Weinstein, well-connected to the Republicans, has recently been appointed Archivist of the United States by the Bush administration. In charge of the public recording of Government actions, Weinstein will be looking after the secrets and lies of the administrations of Bush senior and junior. President Bush has chosen his historical gatekeeper well.
Unlike Weinstein, David Abraham is a historian whose scholarly transgressions, although publicly corrected despite being marginal to his work, earnt him the ultimate academic sanction.Abraham is a Marxist and mere carelessness was sufficient pretext for punishment. In 1983, Abraham had published a highly praised book on German business support during Hitler’s rise to power. This thesis provoked two senior, and bitterly ant-Marxist, historians into an unprecedented vendetta against Abraham, accusing him of forgery, lying and fabrication of archival records.
Abraham admitted to errors in archival research, publicly corrected these errors, and conclusively disproved the charge of forgery. His thesis that the German capitalist class supported Hitler stood solid despite his archival sloppiness but his attackers did not retire and ‘Dear Colleague’ letters and telephone calls sabotaged the university appointments of the Marxist historian, forcing Abraham to start afresh on a career as a Law professor.
Another to unjustly fall foul of conservative charges of academic fraud was Michael Bellesiles, whose 2000 book, Arming America, had shown that Americans’ love affair with the gun was an “invented tradition”dating well after the US Constitution had supposedly enshrined the right to bear arms as inherently American.
Bellesiles had analysed wills to show that only 15% of white adult males owned guns in the two centuries before the Civil War. A tiny part of this data, however, had been presented in a way which could be construed as biasing his thesis. Despite a correction in the book’s second edition, and despite the wills’ evidence being only one source amongst many for his amply-supported thesis, he was savaged by the gun lobby which turned Bellesiles’ evidentiary molehill into a mountain of denigration which was also scaled by journalists, historians and his university employers who set up an investigatory panel.
The campaign ended Bellesiles’ career, not because of inadequate notekeeping, but because of the political clout of the gun lobby. When the economist, John Lott, argued in his 1998 book, More Guns, Less Crime, that States with laws allowing people to carry concealed weapons have lower crime rates, Lott fraudulently invented a survey which claimed that merely brandishing a gun without firing it will, 98% of the time, be effective. Lott, his message being one the gun lobby wanted to hear, went about his fraudulent work unhindered.
Also on the right side of political power was Stephan Thernstrom, a neo-conservative hero for an incident in 1991 when the Harvard professor and author of works that blamed black educational disadvantage on black people, claimed to have become a victim of ‘political correctness’ and‘McCarthyism of the Left’ by being hounded out of teaching by militant black students.
What really happened was that three black female students complained about Thernstrom’s unbalanced assigned reading and ‘racially insensitive’ interpretations of the black experience in one lecture and went to talk to him about it. Thernstrom responded by refusing to teach the course again. The Bush conservatives rewarded their hero with an appointment to the National Council on the Humanities.
A sympathetic media spectacle advanced Thernstrom’s career but a hostile media burnt Mike Davis. The Marxist author of Ecology of Fear was denounced as a fraud in 1998 for a few trivial footnote errors that inevitably cropped up in a 484 page book with 831 footnotes. The posse was led by a Malibu realtor whose billion dollar real estate company stood to lose business from Davis’ exposure of the irresponsibility of Los Angeles developers in promoting reckless high-rise development in a city historically subject to earthquakes. Davis’ temporary blacklisting may have had much to do with “the Los Angeles Times running articles on page one about charges of research fraud in his book”. Unable to refute Davis, wealthy LA sought to destroy him through nitpicking the accuracy of his documentation.
Unlike Davis, the conservative anti-feminist, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, was treated with kid gloves by institutional and media power despite serious academic misdemeanours. Fox-Genovese was the subject of complaints from Emory University students and colleagues that she was engaging in sexual harassment, discrimination and emotional bullying. The charges that Fox-Genovese forced students to pick up her laundry, host parties, clean her house, walk her dog, pay for lunch and give her “hugs”, whilst directing verbal abuse at all she disapproved off, did not stir university administrators to action.
When dozens of eminent historians and students were lined up against Fox-Genovese when one case went to court in 1996, her employers chose to fork out a million dollars in an out-of-court settlement rather than see her misconduct publicly exposed. The absence of critical media scrutiny smoothed the award of a National Humanities Medal by Bush in 2003 for this Republican hero.
If Fox-Genovese was the lecturer from hell, then Dino Cinel was the lecherer from heaven. This ‘porn professor’, a former priest, defrocked for sexual abuse of teenage boys and possession of child pornography, did not disclose his past to the appointment committee of CUNY University, despite the cause of his dismissal being relevant to his new position involving authority over young people. Despite obtaining his job fraudulently, Cinel’s defenders delayed the disciplinary process for five years before his eventual dismissal in 1995.
Weiner’s other case studies include two celebrity historians and plagiarists (Doris Goodwin, historian of the Kennedys, and Stephen Ambrose, patriotic war historian) whose “literary larceny” went unpunished because of their orthodox politics.
For leftwing historians, punishment is no more than a careless footnote away. Inconsequential errors are microscopically examined and magnified in the conservative media. Focusing on minor discrepancies in the documentation and concealing their political disagreements behind vociferous charges of ‘fraud’, powerful conservative movements and institutions can undo careers whilst their right wing peers are rewarded despite massive fraud and deception.
“Accuracy is a duty not a virtue” says Weiner, quoting the historian, E.H. Carr. For the left historian, accuracy (to the nth degree), it would seem, is also needed as insurance against the frenzied footnote fetishists of the academic and political right.