So Stephen Ambrose stole (borrowed, used) a few sentences, phrases and paragraphs from other writers here and there in his mega-selling books of popular history — so what? Nobody is saying his stuff is inaccurate. Nobody got hurt, right?
Well, actually, that’s not right.
There were a whole lot of victims — and not just the historians whose words Ambrose plagiarized.
As trite as it may sound, everyone’s the loser when a writer, particularly a historian, such as Ambrose, takes the lazy way out and copies someone else’s words, perspectives and ideas and presents them as his own.
What’s lost, at that moment, is an opportunity for a new insight into — a fresh way of understanding — the human condition.
But it’s just words, isn’t it? It really doesn’t matter.
What’s the harm if, in his 1975 book, “Crazy Horse and Custer” (Anchor), Ambrose writes of Custer: “He was the first into the fight and the last man to leave the field”? It’s succinct, vivid and melodious.
Who cares that, 16 years earlier, in “Custer” (University of Nebraska Press), Jay Monaghan had written, “He was first to get into the fight and last to leave the field”?
But words are never just words.
Words are ideas. Words have power.
If you don’t think so, just consider how world history might have been different if Winston Churchill had simply reheated someone else’s earlier prose when addressing the House of Commons — and the British people, and the rest of the world — in June 1940, during World War II.
Instead, he came up with his own words, and they were a stirring call to arms for all nations fighting the Nazi juggernaut:
“We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.”
Or consider, as Gary Wills has done, how Abraham Lincoln changed the way Americans think of their nation with his Gettysburg Address, which ended:
“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
Such words are so eloquent, so musical, so dead-on that, for a writer — any writer — they’re fun simply to type. There may have been something like that operating in the use (borrowing, theft) by Ambrose of other writers’ words.
Of course, no one would expect an Ambrose turn-of-phrase to have as significant an impact on history as the words of Churchill and Lincoln.
Stock-in-trade
But, as a historian, Ambrose’s stock-in-trade is his ideas and the way he expresses them in words. And, in a career of writing for the general public that has spanned more than a quarter of a century, Ambrose has shown himself highly skilled at reframing history. His hero-worshiping attitude toward American soldiers of World War II, for example, now pervades the national consciousness.
And, despite what many Americans believe, history isn’t a cut-and-dried collection of names and dates. Interpretations of events from the past are constantly in flux, and even the “facts” of those events are routinely challenged as new information and data are unearthed.
“History doesn’t sit still,” says Arnita Jones, the executive director of the American Historical Association. “It does change, depending on who’s telling the story and what documents have been dug up lately.”
Take, for example, the work of David McCullough who, in 1992, single-handedly resurrected the reputation of Harry S Truman with a well-written and highly laudatory biography of the much-maligned president. He worked the same magic again last year with a biography of the often-denigrated John Adams.
Other examples abound of historians changing the way we look at the world, including William Cronon’s 1991 “Nature’s Metropolis,” which provided new insights into the economic and geographic underpinnings of Chicago’s emergence as a major American city, and William McNeill’s 1976 “Plagues and Peoples,” which showed the extent to which history has been shaped by disease.
A historian who doesn’t look at the people and events of the past with new eyes isn’t doing the job.
Since the beginning of the new year, reporters and scholars have, in at least four of Ambrose’s 25-plus books, found instances in which the now-retired University of New Orleans history professor lifted sentences, phrases and paragraphs from other works without proper attribution in the text. The books are “The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s over Germany” (2000), “Citizen Soldiers” (1997), and “Nixon: Ruin and Recovery 1973-1990” (1991), all published by Simon & Schuster, as well as the much-earlier “Crazy Horse and Custer.”
`The Wild Blue’
The first charges of plagiarism came Jan. 4 when The Weekly Standard magazine published on its Web site a story documenting Ambrose’s use in “The Wild Blue” of several passages from the 1995 book “The Wings of Morning” by Thomas Childers.
Ambrose quickly issued a statement through Simon & Schuster, apologizing for copying the passages and promising to correct the problem in later editions.
For his part, Childers, a University of Pennsylvania professor, responded graciously, telling the New York Times, “I think it is a classy thing to do, and I appreciate it.”
That combination of a quick apology by Ambrose and a gracious response from Childers probably helped blunt a loud outcry from the historical community at Ambrose’s misuse of sources, even as more instances became public, according to several historians.
It’s not that Ambrose’s plagiarism is being excused. Any college student who did what Ambrose did — failed to put another author’s words in quotes — “would get an F for the course,” says Barbara Metcalf, a history professor at the University of California at Davis. But there has been no organized effort among his fellow scholars to run Ambrose out of town.
The news media, though, has been another story, turning a Condit-like spotlight on Ambrose and his actions. For this, Ambrose, in many ways, has himself to blame. After courting celebrity for more than a decade, he has become the nation’s best-known and best-selling historian. If he were still an obscure history professor in New Orleans, little of this would ever get before the public.
What has also blunted scholarly criticism has been the way Ambrose borrowed (stole, used) material from his sources.
Praise for others
For one thing, he has often been a cheerleader for the work of those who’ve gone before him — and whose words, it turns out, he has appropriated.
In “Crazy Horse and Custer,” for example, he writes that he doesn’t need to go into the details of Custer’s Civil War service since “Custer’s biography has been written, accurately and wisely, by Jay Monaghan. Indeed, Monaghan’s `Custer’ is a model biography — scholarly, detailed and lively. It cannot be surpassed and hardly needs to be summarized.”
For another, unlike most plagiarists, Ambrose has footnoted those places in the text where he consulted such earlier works. Thus, looking at the footnotes for “Crazy Horse and Custer,” it’s easy to find instances in which Ambrose used Monaghan’s words as his own.
An examination of a sample of 20 such footnotes in “Crazy Horse and Custer” found that, out of 150 sentences cited in Monaghan’s book, Ambrose used all or part of 16 as his own.
Of these the most extensive passage was a paragraph on the 1860 presidential election:
Ambrose: “On election night Custer, with many friends, stayed up long after `lights out’ waiting for the final returns. By midnight the cadets knew that Lincoln had won. Some southern cadets hanged his body in effigy from a tree in front of the barracks; Custer and other northern cadets cut it down before dawn.”
Monaghan: “On election night he, with many friends, stayed awake long after `lights out,’ waiting for the final returns. By midnight they learned that Lincoln had won. Disgruntled `Southrons’ hanged the Rail Splitter in effigy from one of the elms in front of the barracks. Northern boys cut it down before dawn.”
Such copying is plagiarism, pure and simple. But it’s less flagrant than many other forms. “The least interesting case of plagiarism — I’m not saying it’s not plagiarism — is to lift whole sentences,” says Metcalf, who recently stepped down as the chairwoman of the American Historical Association committee that hears plagiarism complaints.
Much more egregious, she says, was a recent case of an historian who borrowed another writer’s entire approach, duplicating to an unacceptable degree sentence structure, the ordering of paragraphs and the method of storytelling.
In fact, there are circumstances under which it’s not necessary for a historian to mention in the text that certain material has been picked up from another source.
Mining quotes
For example, in writing her 1994 book, “No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II” (Simon & Schuster), Doris Kearns Goodwin was unable, because of the great passage of time, to interview her two subjects and many of those around them.
So she extensively mined several earlier books for quotes from the Roosevelts and their circle.
In using these quotes, Goodwin noted her sources in her footnotes but not in the text itself. This, historians say, is acceptable.
The Tribune’s comparison of the Ambrose and Monaghan books found that, despite picking up sentences here and there, Ambrose wasn’t wedded to Monaghan’s work. He had synthesized material from many sources and was producing his own version of Custer’s life.
In more than two dozen books, Ambrose has proved that he’s a sprightly writer and a compelling storyteller. He has also proved that he had no need to use (steal, borrow) the work of other writers without proper attribution.
Why he did it remains for him to answer.
