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Order your subscription now at http://chronicle.com/4free?es _________________________________________________________________ From the issue dated June 27, 2003 Seeing Red By SCOTT McLEMEE It all started on a friendly enough note, as an online chat among labor historians about the definitive books in their field. Late last month, in the course of a few rounds of e-mail messages, subscribers to H-Labor listed a wide range of titles that they would recommend to their students. The tone was collegial; some scholars even had the pleasure of seeing their own work nominated. Then somebody asked about the late Philip S. Foner -- and the mood changed fast. The author or editor of more than a hundred volumes, Foner published studies on a broad range of topics involving the American labor movement, as well as pioneering work on African-American history. His interpretations were unmistakably Marxist, which made his life difficult, even before Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy came along. But by the 1960s, his intransigence, as well as his superhuman energy, made him a hero to some younger scholars. Just a few months before his death in 1994, Foner received a lifetime achievement award from the New York Labor History Association. The mention of his name sent a jolt through the e-mail list. Someone called him a left-wing hack, but that was before things started getting really harsh. His footnotes were notoriously unreliable, critics said. He cited archival documents he could not have actually seen, including some that may never have existed. And worse, he was a serial plagiarist on a vast scale -- with substantial parts of his work lifted from unpublished research by other scholars. His defenders say the accusations are just a continuation of an anti-communist witch hunt that drove Foner out of academic life for much of his career. Eric Foner, a professor of history at Columbia University, says that his uncle's radical politics are the crux of the recent debate. "Obviously, any charge of plagiarism needs to be taken seriously," he says. "But I think that this controversy is being muddied up with powerful ideological issues that ought to be kept quite separate." The situation was politicized long before the online discussion began, according to John Earl Haynes, the co-editor of a series of volumes on the American Communist Party drawn from Soviet archives. "Phil Foner is immune. He was a repeated plagiarist, but it doesn't make any difference, because he's a hero to radical historians," says Mr. Haynes. Concerns about Foner's "sloppy scholarship" and questionable practices first emerged in the early 1970s, he notes. That Foner continued to be a role model suggests to Mr. Haynes that labor history is "not among the healthy sections of the profession." Old Complaints Revisited Suspicions about Philip Foner may have circulated quietly among his peers for decades, but the current discussion is far more heated, and considerably more public. In late May, the volume of traffic on H-Labor reached 50 messages a day, a record for the normally quiet list. Then the exchange began to spill over to people outside the field. Mr. Haynes posted excerpts on H-HOAC, a list on the history of American communism that he moderates. A condensed version of the debate then appeared on the History News Network, which has a large readership among laypeople. The accusations of plagiarism and professional malfeasance sounded all too familiar to readers who had only recently heard similar stories about Stephen Ambrose, Michael Bellesiles, and Doris Kearns Goodwin. The debate also opens old wounds from political conflicts in decades past. In 1941, Philip Foner was one of dozens of faculty members at the City College of New York to be fired for membership in the Communist Party. His three brothers also lost their jobs in the city's educational system. In 1981, the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York issued a formal apology to those dismissed, declaring the purge a violation of academic freedom. In the meantime, Foner spent many years working as an editor for a commercial press. He also published a steady stream of work in labor and African-American history. In 1967, he became a professor of history at Lincoln University, a historically black institution near Philadelphia, where he remained until his retirement in 1979. He continued to be prolific throughout the remaining years of his life -- with the 11th and 12th volumes of his History of the Labor Movement in the United States in progress when he died. That series, Foner's magnum opus, may be his most characteristic work. When he began the project in the 1940s, he meant it as a rebuttal to the four-volume History of Labor in the United States prepared by John R. Commons and other scholars at the University of Wisconsin in the early decades of the 20th century. For "the Wisconsin school," labor organizations did not challenge the fundamental values of industrial capitalism. Rather, workers used unions to improve their position within the existing order. For Foner, by contrast, unions were part of a broader movement for democratization -- a means of struggling for political and social goals such as equality and power, as well as better wages, hours, and working conditions. "He was a pioneer in the development of labor history as a discipline, in moving it out of the economics department," says Nelson N. Lichtenstein, a professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He notes that Foner chronicled the struggles of black and female workers at a time when the constituency of unions was assumed, by default, to be white and male. By the late 1960s -- despite his marginality, or perhaps because of it -- Foner was an acknowledged influence on the younger generation of historians studying the labor movement. Strangely Familiar Meanwhile, Foner was in turn being influenced by lesser-known scholars, to put it as kindly as possible. The first sign of trouble came in 1971, when James O. Morris published an article in Labor History charging that Foner's book The Case of Joe Hill (International Publishers, 1965) contained extensive plagiarism from an unpublished master's thesis that Mr. Morris wrote in the 1950s. "About one quarter of the Foner text is a verbatim or nearly verbatim reproduction of the Morris manuscript," he wrote. That was a low estimate, because Mr. Morris also noted that many of the primary sources quoted in his thesis also appeared in Foner's book -- passages that "begin at the same word in a broken sentence, involve the same pattern of dots for omitted material, end at the same point. ..." In his reply, published along with Mr. Morris's article, Foner listed the archives and sources he had consulted. He acknowledged reading the thesis, but said he did so only toward the end of his research. He did not respond to Mr. Morris's documentation, in side-by-side columns, that compared Foner's book to the thesis and showed extensive borrowing, much of it word for word. It was not to be the only time. Melvyn Dubofsky, a professor of history and sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton, found "large chunks" of his dissertation incorporated, without attribution, into the fourth volume of Foner's History of the Labor Movement. "Later, I discovered he did the same with other dissertations too numerous to mention," he told H-Labor. Without noting the parallel with Mr. Morris's complaint, Mr. Dubofsky likewise points out that citations from primary sources in Foner's work tend to be exactly the same as those found in unpublished work by graduate students. Other questions about Foner's documentation prove even more troubling. "I had a student working on the fur and leather workers' union, which Foner had written a book about," says Mr. Dubofsky. "She could not find the materials" in union records that Foner cited in his notes. "What happened? Did they exist?" In a book on the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical union, Foner claimed to have consulted government records that Mr. Dubofsky says he could never have actually examined, because they were classified and unavailable to researchers. 'Processing Error' Such allegations were well known within labor history during the 1970s and 1980s, according to scholars in the field, including some who remain sympathetic to Foner. "The tragedies of his life were multiple," says Santa Barbara's Mr. Lichtenstein. "He was on the margins of academic life, and even when he got back in, he didn't interact much with the mainstream. So I don't think he ever really held himself to academic standards." Mr. Lichtenstein recalls hearing Foner lecture on the Molly Maguires -- the Irish-American labor organization that emerged in Pennsylvania's coalfields in the 1870s. "It felt like I was in the presence of someone who was from the 19th century himself, when being a historian meant, first of all, just assembling tremendous amounts of documents. So yes, we knew there were various problems in his own writing. You knew you wouldn't want to rely on him as a source, but would need to check it. On the other hand, I take the collections of documents that he edited at face value. Once you get past the 'gotcha' plagiarism stuff, he still has an important place in the development of labor history." Another scholar, David R. Roediger, a professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, worked with Foner more directly -- collaborating with him on Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day, published by Greenwood Press in 1989. "The nature of our collaboration was that he gave me boxes with all sorts of material in it, almost all primary sources." Foner himself drafted one chapter of the book. "I felt like I needed to check to make sure that everything in it was original," Mr. Roediger says, "because I knew the work would be scrutinized." Foner shrugged off the charges of impropriety, Mr. Roediger recalls. "He basically said the same things that Ambrose later did: 'I write a lot of books, I have research help' -- mostly the women in his life -- 'I have a mountain of notes, and sometimes can't tell what's what.' That was his reasoning -- it was just a processing error that crept in every once in a while. He also had a photographic memory, so that may have been a factor." Mr. Roediger also makes a point that Foner's ideological opponents might well pounce on with glee. "There's a sense in which Communist culture could have been part of it," he says. Some works attributed to the Communist Party leader William Z. Foster were actually written by Foner, notes Mr. Roediger. The historian may have taken for granted that the norms of a "professional revolutionary" (in Lenin's phrase) applied to professional historians. In short: Labor is collective, but final authority belongs to the senior comrade. Closing Ranks The question remains: Why did his colleagues put up with it? Younger labor historians in the 1970s and '80s "tended to be people with left sympathies, who felt the man had suffered enough," says Mr. Dubofsky. "So even the people whose work he had borrowed from freely did not want to say anything." Mr. Dubofsky also points out that their options were limited. Any scholar asking for legal advice would, says Mr. Dubofsky, have been warned against seeking remedies -- for an author whose work does not generate a revenue stream can win only symbolic damages, a token amount as low as one penny. Finding their research pillaged may have become a rite of passage for graduate students in labor history; it could also be a painful experience that left younger scholars feeling helpless. Steven Rosswurm is not eager to revisit the memory of reading Labor and the American Revolution (Greenwood Press), one of several titles Foner turned out in 1976 for the bicentennial. He recalls the deja vu of encountering long passages from sources unearthed while working on his master's thesis, later incorporated into Mr. Rosswurm's book Arms, Country and Class: The Philadelphia Militia and "Lower Sort" During the American Revolution, 1775-1783 (Rutgers, 1987). "At the time, I was certain, about 150 percent certain, that they had been plagiarized from my work," recalls Mr. Rosswurm. While quoting primary materials cited by another scholar may not be plagiarism in the strictest sense, digging materials out of an archive does tend to leave a historian feeling proprietary about them. He later learned that Foner had borrowed his thesis through an interlibrary loan. When asked how he felt at the time, Mr. Rosswurm uses colorful language connoting violent anger. But he also sounds unhappy at speaking ill of the dead. "It's been almost 30 years, so I put it out of my mind a long time ago," he says. "I'm not so sure it was a matter of leftist sympathies as it was just being a graduate student. When you're a graduate student, you get used to being screwed." Check Your Footnotes "If you look at the whole of his body of work, a lot of historians think that my uncle's most important contributions are things that aren't being discussed at all in this," says Eric Foner. "He edited the writings of Frederick Douglass at a time when, believe it or not, nobody remembered him. He edited seven volumes of documents on the history of black labor in the United States, and collections of material from black political conventions in the 19th century. And he did all of it without research assistants or grants. This debate is not doing justice to his contributions to scholarship." The New York Labor History Association has no plans to revoke the lifetime-achievement award it gave Foner in 1994, according to the group's president, Irwin Yellowitz, a professor emeritus of history at CUNY's City College. "I was on the board, and there was a discussion about the rumors that he had been cutting corners," he says. "But the decision was finally made that the award would be given in recognition of the body of work as a whole, even if it was not always of the very highest quality all throughout." And it may be that Foner has made a contribution of a different sort, over the years, albeit quietly. John Haynes recalls a seminar in graduate school, sometime in the early 1970s, when a professor handed out chapters from Foner's latest book, still in galleys. The assignment for each student: to check up on the footnotes, as much as possible. By the following week, Mr. Haynes recalls, a number of people reported large discrepancies between what the text said about the sources and the sources themselves. "The professor didn't say very much. He knew Foner. In fact, he was very fond of Foner, but I think he knew very well what we were going to find," says Mr. Haynes. "This was, in part, an object lesson. He was telling us, 'Here's a big name. But just because he's a big name, don't assume that he does things right. And you'd better learn from this example, unless you want to have a classroom full of graduate students make the same kind of discovery about you someday.'" _________________________________________________________________ You may visit The Chronicle as follows: http://chronicle.com _________________________________________________________________ Copyright 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
