Three years ago, journalist Mark Lewis made a startling discovery in the history
section of a Manhattan Barnes & Noble.
For a biography he was writing, Lewis wanted to see what historians had to
say about an army officer named William B. Hazen who attended West Point with
Custer. So he looked him up in Stephen Ambrose’s book Crazy Horse
and Custer.
“On the evening of June 29,” he read, “two newly
arrived cadets got in a fight over their respective places before a water faucet.”
Then he looked up Hazen in Custer, by the late Jay Monaghan (a historian and
consultant on Western documents at UC Santa Barbara). Here it said almost the
exact same thing: “On the evening of June 29, 1861, two newly arrived
cadets got in a fight over their respective places before a water faucet.”
Lewis smiled and thought to himself: “Aha. So that’s how Ambrose
produces so many books.” And he promptly forgot about it.
Then, while visiting his parents in Ojai, he met a family friend: David
Sievert Lavender, a kindly former English teacher and the author of more than 40 books on the
Old West.
* * *
For a historian, being plagiarized is a little like being mugged, except you
find out by reading about it in the paper. This January, it was revealed that
as many as seven passages written by Lavender made a surprise second appearance
in Stephen Ambrose’s best-selling 2000 book Nothing Like It In The
World: The Men Who Built The Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869.
But even when the alleged theft of your writing makes national news and threatens
to dethrone one of the most celebrated authors in the United States, life goes
on as usual. At 91, Lavender continues to write from his sun-flooded, ranch-style
home nestled among the citrus groves, where he lives with his wife Muriel, as
well as his books, Southwestern wall hangings and 19th century rifles.
He has never met Ambrose, read his book or received so much as a phone call
from him. He is simply bemused.
Lavender has the wry, self-effacing humor of an old cowboy like Will Rogers,
with a tendency to apologize unnecessarily for rambling tales he spins of old
times.
Reading what others have written, a historian often comes across a description
of a mood, or a moment, that’s just right. But stealing another person’s
description, Lavender says, has never been a temptation. “If you’re
thoroughly engaged in what you’re doing, you’ll get around it,”
he muses. “You use your ingenuity.” He says he’s not sure
Ambrose stole from him intentionally. “The ball’s in my court,”
he says.
Soon after the plagiarism story broke, Lavender met a group of historians, sworn
foes of Ambrose. Their cause still hasn’t gained much notice in the press.
Proclaiming themselves the Committee For The Protection of What Is Truth In
Railroad History, these men are dedicated to exposing America’s top historian
--but not for plagiarism.
“They were just after him for being a lousy historian,” says Lavender.
* * *
Historians often divide themselves into two camps: the “academic historians,”
who answer obscure questions, and the “popular historians,” who
publish tales meant to appeal to the masses. But Stephen Ambrose, 66, is both.
He’s a Ph.D, a former professor who could also be the most-read historian
in the country.
Ambrose isn’t exactly new to writing about the West; he wrote a book on
Custer and Crazy Horse in 1975. But it was his 1990s stories of heroic World
War II G.I.s, riding a wave of renewed interest in the Greatest Generation,
that earned him his fame and colossal book advances from Simon & Schuster,
said to be in the millions. So it was a sudden shift in gears when he
lept back to the 1800s with a book
about Lewis and Clark (1996’s Undaunted Courage), and its follow-up,
Nothing Like It In The World.
A railroad book was his editor’s idea, Ambrose writes in his prologue.
To prepare, Ambrose writes, he spent six months in the library catching up on
rail history, then taking an informative train trip from coast to coast. Ambrose
works fast these days, with research done by his children, allowing him to release
a book a year. Detractors call Ambrose the head of a “factory.”
Lavender, on the other hand, has spent almost his whole life writing and thinking
about life in the Old West -- and he has a reputation for living the Old West.
The grandson of a Colorado Supreme Court justice, he took home a 1931 diploma
in Princeton -- no small sign of privilege, especially in Depression times.
But he felt walled in by Ivy League life, and made for his native Colorado after
graduation. There he spent seven years working in mines and out on cattle ranges.
In his twenties he witnessed Western life being changed forever by declining
profits, dried-up mines and new machinery. He tried to capture the vanishing
world of his boyhood in a book, One Man’s West, with nostalgia
and humor.
“Came a day when I wanted to get married and have a stake,”
is how he starts the book, before describing the last days of the gold mining
town that he blew into for the prospect of earning five dollars a day. “Over
it all hung the ineffable sadness of departed wealth.” He describes
clinging to a pony for dear life, watching his past flash before his eyes, after
his ride, stumbling over an icy bridge, almost hurls him into a deadly
gulch. The best way to see the mountains, he wrote, was lying on your back, looking
at the “sheer watercourses, the scars cut by snowlines, the vaulting
ridges -- each soaring line lift[ing] your eye irresistably to the crenulated
peaks…”
Finally, he took his stake in Ventura County. He’d been working on his
stepfather’s ranch, but it failed in 1938, forcing him to find a new job
managing a gold mill in Bishop, California. Lavender got a teaching job at Ojai’s
Thacher school, where he worked for 22 years before becoming a full-time writer.
It was always hard to teach his kids the importance of doing original research
he says.
Other historians speak fondly of Lavender and his thoughtful books about the
West. “David Lavender is a great man,” says David Bain, author of
Empire Express. He’s one of several historians who this year
gave Lavender a piece of rail from the original transcontinental railroad, honoring
him for his contributions to railroad history. Every one of Lavender’s
books, Bain says, “is as solid as granite in terms of its scholarship
and literary quality.”
Could Ambrose’s book have been rushed out to compete with Empire Express
-- which received a major release in late 1999?
Bain isn’t sure. A writing professor at Middlebury College in Vermont,
he has spent about 25 years working on Empire Express. Like historians across
the country, he’s mainly flabbergasted by the plagiarism. He’s heard
of stealing other people’s research. But “it’s such a strange,
and ironic, and really loony thing to be stealing the prose,” Bain says.
“Why not write from your heart?”
* * *
New Year’s Day, 2002. Mark
Lewis, now working for the news website Forbes.com, ran into an old friend.
David Lavender was watching the Fiesta Bowl game. He was rooting for his home
team, Colorado, who ended up being steamrolled 38-16 by Oregon in an embarassing
upset. Then the journalist and the old historian got to talking. Lavender asked
Lewis how his book was going.
Lewis told him he was still working on it, but had to get a regular job to pay
the bills. Lavender, whose grown-up Thacher students still come to him for advice
on writing and life, offered Lewis warm encouragement.
Lewis was still thinking of their talk three days later, when, back in New York,
he saw an astounding headline from the new issue of the Weekly Standard:
“Stephen Ambrose, Copycat.”
Ambrose’s book The Wild Blue, the article said, had copied parts
of The Wings of Morning by Thomas Childers. Remembering the Barnes
& Noble episode, Lewis made for the New York Public Library and pulled the
two Custer books from the stacks. Comparing the two, he found enough similarities
to write an article titled, “Ambrose Has Done It Before.”
Then he had a hunch. Ambrose’s second-to-last book was about the transcontinental
railroad. Could he have plagiarized from David Lavender, who’d written
a book or two about railroad tycoons?
It wasn’t hard to find out. What leaves other historians flabbergasted
by the way Ambrose uses other people’s writing is that he footnotes it,
making it easy to trace. Ambrose’s defense is that a footnote makes it
clear enough he’s using another source, and is giving enough credit to
the original -- even though this kind of habit would get a college freshman
expelled.
And sure enough, seven times where Ambrose footnoted Lavender, he had recycled
or barely rewritten the other man’s paragraphs. Lewis broke the news in
another story that made national news, and kept historians across the country
buzzing.
"What interested him were
those widely spaced saddles in the ridgetop. By weaving in and out of them,
his railway--he was already coupling the possessive to the noun--could ascend
toward the ultimate crest of the mountain on an even grade not in excess of
the capabilities of the locomotives of his time."
-- David Lavender, The Great Persuader, page 87
"What interested him most
were the widely spaced saddles in the ridge line. By weaving in and out of them,
the railroad could ascend toward the ultimate crest of the mountains on an even
grade not in excess of the capability of the locomotives, or a maximum of a
hundred feet per mile."
-- Stephen Ambrose, Nothing Like It In The World, page 69
* * *
“The Sins of Stephen Ambrose”
is a document claiming to find more than 60 mistakes in Nothing Like It
In The World. It’s compiled by a number of lesser-known railroad
historians who nitpick Ambrose without mercy. But you don’t have to be
an expert to agree with some of their findings, especially if you’re a
Californian who knows the lay of the state. The anti-Ambrose crusaders say he took this dialogue, so reminiscent of
an ABC
Afterschool Special, from a coffee table book. The real quote, according to
Crocker’s testimony before the U.S. Congress, was, “Make Masons
out of Chinamen? Did they not build the Chinese wall, the biggest piece of masonry
in the world?” It’s a much more Victorian way of putting it, and
the historians can’t figure out why Ambrose didn’t use it.
For example, we all know that gold is typically found in “them thar hills.”
But Ambrose puts the big find at Sutter’s Mill “on a branch of the
American River about forty miles west of present-day Sacramento.” That
would mean Napa wine country.
And he describes rails shipped east by water, from Sacramento along the Sacramento
River. In fact, the Sacramento River goes north from Sacramento, so it couldn’t
be used to ship anything to the railroad (which was to the east).
Dismiss these as typos, and you’re still left with a part where Ambrose
mentions “welders” in 1869. There wouldn’t be acetylene torches
for another 20 years, and no one was welding much of anything. Ambrose turns
unrelated people into brothers. He has Confederate leader Robert E. Lee capturing
secret orders from the Union Army before Antietam, when it was the other way
around.
And, his critics say, whenever he’s faced with a thrilling story that
might not be true, his tendency is to tell it as fact: for example, Chinese
workers lowering themselves down a cliffside in baskets they made out of reeds,
in a larger-than-life scene that many historians doubt happened. “Nowhere
will you see it as colorful as in Ambrose,” Lavender says.
Ambrose writes in a nonchalant, anachronistic style that’s just right
for describing grizzled G.Is. of 1945. But it’s jarring when he mentions
that Thomas Durant, a railroad overseer, “wanted to start yesterday.”
He also says Durant has “show-business attributes.” (In those days,
there really wasn’t any business like show business.) And he also puts
some suspiciously modern dialogue into the mouths of people from the 1800s.
For instance, here is how railroad tycoon Charles Crocker argues in favor of
hiring Chinese workers: “They built the great Wall of China, didn’t
they,” he says. “Besides, who said laborers have to be white to
build railroads?”
* * *
Edson Strobridge, 75, of San Luis
Obispo is one of the leaders of the amateur historians devoted to exposing Ambrose
as a shoddy historian. Like most of the group, he’s no professional historian.
He’s a retired Southern California Edison operating manager who became
interested in the subject when he learned his ancestor helped design the railroad.
But he swears he knows his history better than Ambrose.
“I’d love to debate the man in front of a TV camera,” he says.
After the book’s release, Strobridge and friends tried to gain attention with their claims. “They couldn’t get a rise out of Ambrose,” Lavender says. So they tried to interest the media, only managing to gain the interest of the Sacramento Bee, which wrote a mostly overlooked story on the “Sins” in 2001.
Aside from factual errors, Nothing Like It In The World has also mostly escaped notice for another potential charge: a one-sided treatment of the Indian Wars. Though Ambrose devotes much space to Civil War battles back East, Native Americans are rarely mentioned by name. They’re relegated to out-of-context, solitary sentences like this:
Nor so long as the Native Americans
of the Plains were burning, looting,
raping and robbing the American settlers in their homesteads or villages.
That’s from a passage describing
the Indian threat in 1865. Actually, the Indians he refers to were burning and
looting in revenge for the infamous Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, when whites
under the command of Col. John Chivington ambushed sleeping Cheyenne and slaughtered
200.
That goes unmentioned in Nothing Like It In The World, even though
Ambrose clearly knows about it -- after all, he wrote about it in Custer
and Crazy Horse. But his sloppiness has some historians wondering whether
it’s his kids who wrote the book. Plagiarism, they say, could be the least
of his problems.
Another mention of the Native Americans, paraphrased from what a member of Congress
said, simply states that, thanks to the railroad, “the Western Indians
would be quelled.” And it’s a paragraph stolen from Lavender.
Lavender’s version:
In spite of the difference, Aaron Sargent prepared a long speech rehashing the same arguments that had been used over and over in favor of the railroad: the government would save upwards of seven million dollars a year in transporting troops, munitions, and mail; the western Indians would be quelled; emigration to the Coast would be speeded; the intervening territories would be developed; trade with the Orient would jump; California's loyalty to the Union would be assured; foreign aggressors would be confounded; the nation's prestige would soar.
And here’s Ambrose:
He made all the familiar arguments: the government would save millions of dollars in transporting troops, munitions, and mail; the Western Indians would be quelled; emigration to the coast would speed up; the Great Plains would be developed; trade with Japan and China would jump; California's loyalty to the Union would be assured; no foreign army would dare attack California.
With that in mind, there’s a fair question to be
asked.“Why in the
world would he be the one to talk about railroads or Lewis and Clark?”
asks Ventura College history professor John Pendleton.
The New York Times Book Review said of Nothing Like It In
The World,
when released: “Ambrose’s scholarship seems impeccable.” But
the book has turned out to be a disaster for Ambrose from any possible view.
Pendleton, who has written extensively about 20th century pop culture, ys Ambrose
is suffering “the curse of celebrity.” He compares it to television
commentators who came to prominence during the O.J. Simpson trial, then were
assumed to be worthy to comment on everything else in America. “It’s
as though anything they touch has to be good,” he says. Name recognition,
he says, becomes confused with expertise. The celebrity jack-of-all-trades replaces
the person who spends a lifetime learning about one thing.
“It’s like fast food,” Pendleton says. “They’ve
robbed the flavor.”
* * *
Meanwhile in Ojai, David Lavender,
whose Ambrose-inspiring book The Great Persuader remains the 424,157th-most-popular
item at Amazon.com, ponders his next move. He also wonders what it is about
Ambrose that has made his name magic.
He reaches for a forked, heavy piece of pine wood that someone gave him, and
uses it to tell a story of why historians should stay humble.
A friend had spent years searching for the camp where 19th century Army officer
and explorer John C. Fremont was lost in the mountains with his party.
T he wood is chipped with what might be axe blows from Fremont’s men.
“He’s sure that this comes from one of the camps,” Lavender
says, turning it around and studying it. “He decided this was from the
last camp in which so many died.”
“Now prove it!” he says, and then grins. “I’d rather
prove plagiarism.”