[Vision2020] Kidnapping Texts: from Proverbs to the Neo-Confederates

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Dear Visionaries:

I gave this talk at the Idaho Library Association Meeting in Pocatello on Thursday.  I want to thank Tim Hildebrand for making the invitation possible.  The room was filled and people were amazed about what was going on in little ole Moscow.  In the Q & A there were no questions about plagiarism; they were all about Wilson & Co.

For the full text (except for amusing intro things) see www.class.uidaho/ngier/kidnap.htm.

Thanks also to Tom Hansen for his wonderful website.

KIDNAPPING TEXTS: FROM PROVERBS TO THE NEO-CONFEDERATES

By Nick Gier, Professor Emeritus, University of Idaho

Plagiarius: Latin for an abductor; plagiare: to steal

Ancient literature is filled with examples of strikingly similar sayings and texts. The Golden Rule is found in many ancient philosophies and religions, but this is may not be a case of borrowing; rather, it is more likely the result of a universal moral intuition that this is the right way to act.

But let’s examine these two passages:

“Spare not your son from the rod, otherwise, how can you save him from wickedness. If I beat you, son, you will not die, but if I leave you alone, you will not live.”

“Do not withhold correction from a child, for if you beat him with a rod he will not die. You shall beat him with a rod, and deliver his soul from Hell.” 

The first text is from the Ahiqar, a 7th Century BCE Syrian text written in Aramaic.  The second is from Proverbs 23:13-14, KJV. Bible scholars are agreed that Solomon could not have written this book because stylistic and linguistic indications point to the 6th-4th BCE. Did the Syrians receive the Word of God, too?  This should be a lesson for all those who insist on one scripture as a unique and distinctive divine revelation.

Let me now list my favorite examples of plagiarism in the 20th Century.  This sin knows no boundaries, either political or geographic. Robert Kennedy once lifted parts of a paper later found at Syracuse Law School.  Joe Biden borrowed parts of a speech from Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock.  Martin Luther King, Jr. failed to give any attribution to copied portions of his doctoral dissertation at Boston University. The Beatle George Harrison was found guilty of plagiarizing My Sweet Lord and had to pay a fine.

A distinguished Indian physicist B. S. Rajput and his student were recently caught red handed.  The report of a board of inquiry concluded that ‘‘a bare comparison of the two works, not from the viewpoint of a hyper technical or meticulous observer but from the angle of the average reasonable reader, would reveal complete similarity not only in all mathematical equations and symbols but also in the word by word language used in the two works. . . .”  Why do people capable of doing their own high level work steal in such a blatant way?  It is almost as if they want to be caught.

It has now been discovered that there is a German novel from 1916 that Vladimir Nabokov read and evidently kept in his unconscious as he wrote Lolita, which just turned 50 this year.  This type of plagiarism has been called a form of cryptonesia, bringing to consciousness things that we no longer remember hearing or reading.
Gov. Jeb Bush recently hired Lloyd Brown as a writer even though he had been accused of viewing pornography in plain view of others in the pressroom of the Florida Times-Union.  He had been fired from the paper for plagiarizing parts of his editorials.  My source did not clarify if one of these editorials was the one in 2000 that minimized the evils of southern slavery and its later effects on American society.   I chose this particular example because of its relevance to my final example from the neo-Confederates.
	
Let me now spend a little time on the Jay Sokolow case.  Coming to Texas Tech in 1976 he impressed every one with his prodigious scholarly output in the history department. He came up for promotion and tenure in 1981 with a very impressive portfolio.  An outside member of the tenure committee from the English department discovered that one of Sokolow’s articles had been plagiarized.  

Sokolow decided to resign rather than face dismissal proceedings, which his cautious department may not have done.  His colleagues kept the whole case mum, and Sokolow was free to continue his academic career.  There is bitter irony in the fact that he was hired by the National Endowment for the Humanities to review research proposals from historians who were presumably upholding the principles that he had betrayed. 
	
Not only were some of Sokolow’s articles plagiarized, but also a book that got past reviewers at Farleigh Dickinson University Press.  When this book was exposed, the matter came before the American Historical Association, which published a policy on plagiarism in 1986. Even after a reprimand by the AHA, he went on to publish another book on Fourierism with the University of Kentucky Press even though charges of plagiarism in that MS. were circulating among historians.

E. B. White once said that there were three types of plagiarists: the thief, the dope, and the total recall guy.  White defined the dope as “a little vague about the printed word and regards anything in the way of printed matter as mildly miraculous and common property,” and explained the plagiarism of a certain Cornell University president using this category.
	
Thomas Mallon believes that we need a pathological category for people such as Sokolow and Rajput, who are neither common thieves nor dopes.  Unlike most of our students, they have the skills and training to do their own work at a high professional level.	

Mallon builds his case for pathological plagiarism citing various authorities. Martin Amis observes that the psychology of plagiarism is “fascinatingly perverse: it risks, or invites, deep shame, and there must be something of a death-wish in it.”  Peter Shaw proposes that the pathological plagiarist is very much like the kleptomaniac: each do not need to steal, but they compulsively do it anyway.  Physicist Rajput has not attained this level yet, but Sokolov certainly did.
	
The cyber age has brought us yet another type of plagiarist.  The computer can now make all of us potential “total recall” guys and gals.  Steve Wilkins is a conservative Presbyterian minister in Monroe, Louisiana. He loves his Southern heritage, and he hired several of his parishioners to digitize dozens of books on the history of the South. In the early 1990s word was spreading that Wilkins’ own articles and books contained large sections of the words of others.

Wilkins is a founding director of the neo-Confederate League of the South.  The League proposes that 15 Southern States leave the union and form a Calvinist theocracy that would preserve the values of the Anglo-Celtic culture. A key word for the League is “hierarchy,” the God-given right for superiors to rule over inferiors. Wilkins believes that only propertied males should be able to vote.

In 1994 Moscow pastor Douglas Wilson invited Steve Wilkins to a conference on slavery in Moscow.  The result was a booklet co-author by both entitled Southern Slavery As It Was, published in 1996 by Wilson’s own Canon Press.  Wilson and Wilkins argued that the lives of Southern slaves were not as bad as we’ve been told, and they described the antebellum South as the most harmonious multiracial society in human history.

It was not until October of 2003 that the booklet was discovered and the town literally exploded in discussion.  Over 1200 residents of Moscow and Pullman signed a petition condemning Wilson’s views on slavery, women, and homosexuals. In the Moscow-Pullman Daily News Wilson declared that homosexuals should either be executed or banished, and his “Federal Vision” for American Society would deny most women the right to vote.

A professor at the University of Washington, an expert in the history of the American South, determined that 20 percent of the slavery booklet had been plagiarized from a book entitled Time on the Cross.  He is a conservative Christian and he attends a church established in Seattle by some of Wilson’s followers.  For months he had privately pleaded with Wilson to withdraw the booklet from circulation and Wilson finally did in January, 2004.

At first Wilson tried to cover for Wilkins by saying that the existence of the unattributed texts was sloppy editing on his part, but Wilkins finally admitted to being the one at fault.  It is inconceivable that the example that you have in your hands is the result of editing errors.  (View this at www.tomandrodna.com/notonthepalouse/) At least Wilson and Wilkins could have come up with an original subheading!

Supporters of Wilson and Wilkins claim that it is not plagiarizing because they do give some citations from Time on the Cross, but Sokolow most always acknowledged the books from which he lifted passages. We have looked at two other books written by Wilkins and we have found problems there as well.  Typically what we find in these two books is an indented passage that is cited, but when one reads the text cited one discovers that, in one instance, over 200 words that precede the indented passages are also copied from that text. You can view these texts at www.tomandrodna.com/notonthepalouse/SWP.htm. 

In conclusion let me summarize the types of plagiarizers I’ve discussed.  There are the three that E. B. White so aptly named--the common thief, the dope, and the total recall guy.  The fourth is the pathological plagiarizer that we saw in Professor Sokolow, the academic kleptomaniac par excellence.  My digitized recall plagiarizer appears to be a fusion of common thief and dope plus the existence of dozens of digitized texts ever ready for blocking and pasting. This may not be surprising for someone who believes that good Christian men have a biblical right to buy human beings who have been kidnapped.

For my own Wilson page, see www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/Wilson.htm.