Posted on 06/25/2003 7:41:08 AM PDT by aculeus
Nearly twenty years ago I wrote a review essay for L[abor] H[istory] on [Philip] Foner's multivolume history of labor in USA under the title "Give Us That Old-Time Labor History" in which I did not dis his politics or ideology but only hinted at what really needed to be said.
Now that Steve Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Bellesiles, and others have been outed for their plagiarism and other scholarly sins, one should examine more closely how Foner wrote so many books without the team of researchers that John R. Commons had at his service when he directed and wrote an earlier multivolume history of labor. As I discovered when I read Foner's fourth volume on labor, he borrowed wholesale from my then unpublished dissertation. He footnoted materials drawn from my published and copywritten articles and even placed inverted commas around direct quotations, but he took even larger chunks from my dissertation (which in those good old days was neither automatically microfilmed nor copywritten) without attribution or inverted commas (first brought to my attention by a former grad student who reviewed the volume).
Later, I discovered he did the same with other dissertations too numerous to mention. Then when I did my book on the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] I discovered that Foner had never seen documents cited in his footnotes that were supposedly located in the National Archives (they were classified and unavailable to researchers) and that he had destroyed documents at AFL-CIO headquarters (pre Meany Center and pre SHSW AFL collection, the Federation's records were stored in what amounted to an attic room in the headquarters building and rarely examined by scholars).
Years ago I checked the newspapers that he cites so profusely in his footnotes and found that they bore a remarkable resemblance to similar citations in numerous unpublished dissertations. So, its not the politics and ideology that should be condemned but the shoddy scholarship. And as for politics and ideology, all we labor historians are greatly in debt to E.P. Thompson, John Saville, Royden Harrison, George Rude, all of whom were CPGB [Communist Party, Great Britain] members, and especially Eric Hobsbawm, whose association with the CP was longest and firmest.
Mr. Dubofsky is a member of the Department of History, SUNY Binghamton
Perhaps his justifiable anger explains this un-copyrighted error.
He was Eric's uncle.
I'm interested to see this, because I heartily agree with it. Not all Communist historians were liars. I have always disagreed with some of what Hobsbawm says, but he is always honest about it and is indeed a great historian--I'm thinking especially of his work on the Puritan Revolution of the seventeenth century.
I am also greatly indebted to the work of Christopher Hill, whom I much admire. An article posted here sometime last year noted that Hill may once have been a Communist agent. If so, he later broke away from the doctrinaire Communist line in his writings. He never lost his sympathy for the underdog, he just redefined it, presumably when he began to realize that Lenin and Stalin were not the great defenders of the underdogs that they claimed to be.
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