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Every so often, America undergoes a plagiarism scandal. The last major one came during the campaign for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, when it was discovered that one contender -- Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware -- had lifted major parts of a speech from Neil Kinnock, a British Labour Party leader.
No American presidential candidate, except Pat Buchanan, writes his own speeches. So it's hard to see why this derailed the Biden campaign, but it did.
This time around, popular historian Stephen Ambrose is accused of lifting other people's work. Whole passages from his recent The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s over Germany bear more than a passing resemblance to portions of Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II, a 1995 book by Thomas Childers.
Now, I have read and enjoyed many Ambrose books. My problem with Ambrose isn't plagiarism -- it's that he gets things wrong.
Some years ago he had a brief piece in Newsweek about
the Lewis and Clark Expedition, wherein he observed that in
1805, Merriwether Lewis was the first white man to cross
the Continental Divide.
Wrong. Go back to the Coronado expedition of 1540, when Garca Lpez de Crdenas led a party from the valley of the Rio Grande in New Mexico to the rim of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River in Arizona. They must have crossed the Continental Divide in the process.
There was also the Dominguez-Escalante Expedition of 1776, who crossed the Divide at Horse Lake Pass in northern New Mexico on the way from Santa F to Utah Lake.
But even if they were white and literate, they didn't speak the right language. What, then, of Alexander Mackenzie, who crossed from Atlantic to Pacific drainage on June 12, 1793? That was in Canada, and he was a citizen of the wrong empire.
Ambrose eventually qualified the Lewis claim to being the first American citizen to cross the Divide to claim the Pacific Northwest.
Now consider Nothing Like It In the World, Ambrose's 2000 history of the building of the transcontinental Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads that culminated with the 1869 Golden Spike ceremony at Promontory, Utah.
Congress passed the Pacific Railroad Act in 1862, and naturally the movers and shakers of pioneer Denver wanted to be on the main line.
They financed surveys to find a direct route west that might compete with the Wyoming route that was eventually selected. One surveyor was Edward Louis Berthoud, eponym of Berthoud Pass, which was proposed as a railroad route.
Ambrose explains some of that, notes that the U.P. took
a different course, and concludes with In fact, there
was no railroad over Berthoud Pass until 1926.
In fact, there has never been a railroad over Berthoud Pass. Ambrose has it confused with Rollins Pass (also known as Boulder Pass, and incorrectly as Corona Pass), and even then he's got it wrong. David Moffat's Denver, Northwestern & Pacific laid rails across Rollins Pass in 1904, not 1926.
Ambrose's 1926 date apparently comes from the opening of the Moffat Tunnel under Rollins Pass, but it was not holed through until 1927 and did not go into service until 1928.
Granted, this is nit-picking by a Colorado railroad buff. But few topics are as well-documented as railroad history. Even little spur lines like the 20 miles of track that connected the Monarch Quarry to Salida are the subjects of entire books and numerous magazine articles.
This isn't a topic that is difficult to research. But it's apparently a topic that Ambrose didn't think was worth researching, and if he got that wrong, how much of his other material should you trust?
In short, Ambrose's work might have been improved by more plagiarism -- in this case, if he'd borrowed from historians like Marshall Sprague and Robert Athearn, who do get their dates and places right.
As for penalties for plagiarism, it's apparently a serious matter when politicians do it -- Biden's presidential campaign collapsed when he got caught.
For Ambrose, it's a judgment call about where to put the line between drawing on other people's work, which we all must do, and stealing from their work.
And then there the parents of certain high-school students in Piper, Kan. Their offspring were caught plagiarizing their biology papers from the Internet. The teacher, 26-year-old Christine Pelton, rightly flunked them. The parents complained to the school board, which ordered Pelton to go easier.
Rather than tolerate academic dishonesty, she resigned last week. Good for her, and may those parents, and that school board, henceforth be treated by physicians who plagiarized their way through medical school.
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