"Rewriting the history books"

[Mike Yared]

Rewriting the history books
Suzanne Fields
THE WASHINGTON TIMES http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/

It's been a rough few years for historians. The higher the rung,
the greater the fall. Plagiarism infected the works of superstar
authors Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose. Both are prolific
writers who fell prey to pressures of time, sloppy researchers,
careless rewrites and history as big business, all of which
interrupted their 20 minutes of academic celebrity.
More serious charges have been leveled against Michael
Bellesiles, professor of history at Emory University, whose "Arming
America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture," published in 2000,
was hailed as containing enough scholarly ammunition to shoot down the
National Rifle Association. Columbia University gave it a prestigious
prize. The New York Times graced it with the acclaim most historians
only fantasize about. But when critics couldn't find the cited sources
in the footnotes and other claims appeared to be unsubstantiated, the
work failed to prove its sensational claims that few of the early
American colonists owned firearms. Emory University is now
investigating whether the author invented documents, which is even
worse on the ethical scale of history-writing than offering someone
else's words as your own. The National Rifle Association may be safe
after all.
While these high-profile cases get magnified public attention,
another kind of disease may be afflicting the study of history, and
one harder to treat. In fact, you'll need the lens of a powerful
microscope to get it into focus. Fortunately, the microscope is
available. In its current issue, the New Criterion, a journal edited
by Hilton Kramer that prides itself on exposing "intellectual
mendacity," examines two different books with a lens that brings out
the hidden pictures that contain falsehoods.
One of the volumes under its microscope is the "Encyclopedia of
the American Left," published by Oxford University Press. It was
selected by Choice and Library Journal as one of the 10 best reference
books published in 1990. A second edition appeared in 1998. The other
book under scrutiny is John Steinbeck's famous "Grapes of Wrath,"
about a displaced Oklahoma farm family confronting dust, death and
destruction in America of the 1930s.
Paul Buhle, co-editor with his wife of the encyclopedia, is a
popular professor of American civilization at Brown University. He's
well-known for studying and sympathizing with American radicals as
well as making brazen statements. He characterizes Harry Truman as
"America's Stalin" and all our presidents in the second half of the
20th century as "jerks," with, naturally, Ronald Reagan, the "jerkiest
of all."
His sympathies would be unimportant in the encyclopedia if he
scrupulously presented the facts, but that's the rub. His critics are
discovering "falsification and obfuscation" in the encyclopedia's
assertions. For example, it claims that American communists were
prominent in fighting and dying on behalf of Israel in its war of
independence against the Arabs in 1948, but documentation is lacking,
and more than one scholar has called the notion nonsense. The second
edition of the encyclopedia is grossly misleading when it discusses
the new revelations over the huge subsidies the Soviets gave to
American communists.
"Reference books are expected to summarize the scholarly
consensus and to present reliable information," write Harvey Klehr and
John Earl Haynes. Yet the distortions in the encyclopedia have
generally gone unchallenged by historians.
It may take time, but probing academics will, no doubt, set the
record straight. The case of the Steinbeck novel is less clear-cut
because the book has become a myth of the American experience in the
1930s. Fiction has a way of creating indelible history in the public
mind with greater force than historical texts. Homer and Shakespeare
are splendid illustrations of that point. Steinbeck is no Homer or
Shakespeare, but he intersperses fictional chapters with historical
passages reporting on political, economic and social conditions as
though he's informed.
"Unfortunately for the reputation of the author, however," writes
Keith Windschuttle, "there is now an accumulation of sufficient
historical, demographic and climatic data about the 1930s to show that
almost everything about the elaborate picture created in the novel is
either outright false or exaggerated beyond belief." An ambitious
English teacher who assigns "Grapes of Wrath" might challenge students
to evaluate the new historical evidence and show the specific way it
alters the interpretation of the novel.
The movie "Grapes of Wrath," directed by John Ford, is probably
most responsible for turning the human drama of the novel into high
art. Whittaker Chambers, an ex-communist himself, writing in Time
magazine in 1940, got it right. "The Grapes of Wrath is possibly the
best picture ever made from a so-so book," he wrote. "Camera craft
purged the picture of the editorial rash that blotched the Steinbeck
book." This is one time to avoid the book, watch the movie.

[Arthur Rimbaud II]

Good article. Once historians became mini-celebrities things went down hill
fast.

--
Groveling is wrong for the soul, like grappling with whores in a
drugstore. - Hunter S. Thompson