Maybe Now We Should Start Outing All Writers

Current discussions on Stephen Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Bellesiles remind me that the public is so far willing to accept far worse misrepresentations in authorship than these. Ambrose and, to a lesser extent, Goodwin, apparently failed to put in quotation marks or put adequate references to books that they did state they had used. While they may be faulted for trying to write too much too quickly and relying too much on secondary sources, I doubt their books would have been substantially different if they had used more quotation marks or paraphrased, with more footnotes, information that they in any case got from secondary sources, and did not pretend to have got from primary sources. A more serious charge against Ambrose is that he misunderstood and hence garbled beyond physical possibility a description regarding railroad construction in the snow given in a work by Alex Saxton, which the maker of the charge says was not accurate to begin with. This suggests that he and other popular writers should be much more careful in their use and understanding of secondary sources than they now are, and should take the time to do more primary work.

But the fuss over the above reminds me that the press, media, and public seem not to question far more serious deviations from who really wrote what. Autobiographies and other first person works are routinely ghost written, sometimes with co-authorship, sometimes with very minor and even misleading reference to the actual writer, sometimes with no such reference. Katharine Graham was asked many times in interviews if she was really the sole author of the autobiography that bore only her name, so unusual was this deemed to be. Collections of speeches, reports, and position papers written by other people than the credited author are also frequently published without any, or certainly without adequate, indication of who actually wrote them. Even some columns, reviews, articles, etc. are known by insiders to have been written by others than the named authors. Why does this not bring some outcry or demand for a set of standards whose violation should bring at least as much opprobrium as that given to the above authors?

The Bellesiles case is somewhat different, and is still being argued, but it seems to fall into a category that goes beyond different interpretations of primary material into one where scholars' viewpoints may make them misread or possibly misremember this primary material in some cases. It is not the only case in which such points have been made, but because of its subject matter it has got more publicity than others. Scholars are fallible, and even misreading of some primary sources is not always an indication that the scholar in question has not made primarily valid points, even though such a scholar should certainly be warned about his/her future work and fabrication of sources should not be condoned.

Again, there are much more serious cases that often go unpunished. I know of one where a book in an exotic language was paraphrased into a successful US dissertation, and I am sure this is not unique.

At a bare minimum there should be a campaign aimed at authors, editors, and publishers so that the author of record be the actual author of a work, with a threat of public outing when this is not the case, and more concern over major violations than over lesser ones, however prominent their authors or controversial their works. I for one do not see why Doris Goodwin's wonderful PBS commentaries should be suspended because of what she is alleged to have done, especially in view of the far greater authorial sins that are now accepted.

There should, in addition, be more serious questioning of the consequences of pressures that contribute to such authorial misdeeds, chief of which are the monetary, academic, and psychic rewards to authors and the greed (or" capitalist ethic") of publishers, who want a quick succession of profitable books without worrying too much whether their authors followed ethical procedures, or indeed whether the famous or celebrity author on the title page actually wrote some of the books they publish.