[Vision2020] Steve Wilkins' unorthodox writing style

[Nick Gier]

Visionaries:

I've sent the following letter to the Daily News and the Lewiston 
Tribune.  Thanks to Tom for putting the texts on his website so quickly and 
efficiently.

To the Editor:

Last August Douglas Wilson, pastor of Moscow's Christ Church, reported that 
he removed his booklet "Southern Slavery As It Was" from circulation in 
January because of "some real problems with the footnotes" (Daily News 
8/6/03).  Wilson said that he had "revised it and it is now awaiting 
republication."  A year later the title is still listed as out of print at 
Wilson's Canon Press website, so I'm wondering what the delay is.

Is it because the principal of Carey Christian School in Carey, North 
Carolina was forced to remove the slavery booklet from his students' hands 
in December, 2004?  How many other copies of this embarrassing attempt at 
historical revisionism out there in conservative Christian schools and 
neo-Confederate bookstores across the nation?

Or is it because Wilson realized that there were more than just citation 
problems with this outrageous little essay?  Wilson claims that the files 
that he received from his co-author Steve Wilkins were somehow messed 
up.  But it is inconceivable to me that, for example, a subheading "The 
Myth of Slave Breeding" and an entire paragraph taken from Fogel and 
Engerman's Time on the Cross could have been a simple transmission error. 
Twenty percent of the essay comes from this source.  See 
www.tomandrodna.com/notonthepalouse/Plagiarism.htm for facing pages.

I now have more evidence about the deceptive ways in which Wilson and 
Wilkins do their "scholarly" research.  On page 144 of his book on Robert 
E. Lee Call to Duty,Wilkins copies 220 words from C. B. Bracken's book 
Lee:The Last Years before citing a short indented passage from this 
book.  Without doing any research one is left with the impression that the 
preceding words are Wilkins' own when in fact they are most definitely not 
his.

Using the same writing techniques, Wilkins has also copied passages from D. 
S. Freeman's  Robert E. Lee: A Biography for his own book on Lee.  I have 
written to both publishers to inform them of these egregious 
infractions.  Canon Press also sells another Wilkins title, and one wonders 
how many of those words are really Wilkins' own.

The facing pages from the three texts can be viewed at 
www.tomandrodna.com/notonthepalouse/SWP.htm

Nick Gier, Moscow
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