KIDNAPPING TEXTS: FROM PROVERBS TO THE NEO-CONFEDERATES

 

By Nick Gier, Professor Emeritus, University of Idaho

Presented at the Idaho Library Association Meeting

 Pocatello, Idaho, October 7, 2005

 

For more on Wilson and Wilkins see this link

 

Note: I’m heavily indebted to Thomas Mallon’s Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism (New York: Tichnor and Fields, 1989).

 

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 what about 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 Syrian text written in Aramaic.  The second is from Proverbs 23:13-14, KJV. Bible scholars are agreed that Solomon did not write the book and it was written in 6th-4th Centuries. (See Richard J. Clifford, Proverbs: A Commentary [Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999], p. 16, note 27.) Did the Syrians receive the Word of God, too?  This should be a lesson for all those who take one scripture as a unique and distinctive divine revelation.

 

But there may be any even deeper problem here. If the doctrine of divine foreknowledge is true—that God knows everything and every event past, present, and future—then God knew the complete text of Hamlet from eternity, and he knew all the rough drafts of Hamlet that Shakespeare wrote.  Furthermore, he could have performed the play many times and Satan would have made a very good Hamlet.  In this view Shakespeare would be a plagiarizer if he claimed that this play was his own creation.  Read this link for the creator of this playful example and excerpts from his article.

            Since the discovery of Ugaritic texts at Ras Shamrah in 1929, we have learned much about Canaanite culture Bible scholars have found that the Hebrew poets were very much influenced by Canaanite hymns, so much so that they simply replaced the name of Canaanite deities with the name of Yahweh (Jehovah).  At least Psalm 29 (but perhaps more) is a Yahwist adaptation of an older Canaanite hymn to the storm god Baal.  As Mitchell Dahood states:  “Virtually every word in the psalm can now be duplicated in older Canaanite texts” (The Anchor Bible: Pslams, vol. 1, p. 175).

Aristotle’s theory that art is imitation was widely accepted before the rise of modernism.  A conservative Christian critique of abstract art is that it does not make a likeness of God’s creation and it therefore does not glorify God.  But my first art professor at OSU, Berkeley Chappell, once displayed his abstract work alongside close up pictures of trees, rocks, and fields, and the viewer was hard pressed to tell the difference.

Art as imitation might be called a premodern view of artistic creation. In this view there is no distinction between craft and fine art, a modern idea that came out of the Renaissance.  Generally speaking, the artist is inspired by gods or spirits, so we find that the concept of ownership is alien to the premodern mind. In the Bible God owns his creation and everything in it.  The land is to be returned to God every seven years, and in the Jubilee Year, every 49 years all debts are cancelled.  Fundamentalists who use the Bible to support free market economics are abusing their scripture. 

The theory of art as imitation survived in revised form into the 20th Century.  In his 1902 essay “The Ethics of Plagiarism” Brander Matthews states: “It is plagiarism for an author to take anything from another author and reproduce it nakedly,” but “if the second comer can improve on the work of the first comer, if he makes it over and makes it better, and makes it his own, we accept the result and ask no questions” (cited in Mallon, 122). Matthews continues: “In any discussion of plagiarism quite the most important question is the relative value to the borrower of the thing borrowed.  If he has flocks of his own, he may lift the ewe lamb of his neighbor, and only laborious dullness will object” (cited in Mallon, 122).

We have here a distinctively modern twist on the theory of imitation.  The crude imitator is a thief, but the creative one who borrows and makes it his own is a great artist or commendable scholar.  I believe this allows us understand why we condemn our students for the stealing they do, but then we tend to excuse our colleagues for practicing this higher form of imitation.  Matthews believes that there is a world of difference between “independent imitation and slavish copying.” This may be the key, along with a lack of courage, to the sins of omission on the part of historian Jay Sokolow’s colleagues.  More about him below.

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.

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.  Meanwhile a professor from Georgia State was asked to review a book MS. that was part of the portfolio, and even though he sent evidence of plagiarism to various editors, Sokolow finally got a contract with Farleigh Dickinson University Press.  None of these editors ever confronted Sokolow with the evidence that this one reviewer kept giving them.  They simply rejected the MS. and Sokolow just sent it off to another publisher and eventually caught the Farleigh Dickinson editors unaware.

Not only did none of these editors blow the whistle on an intellectual fraud, the Texas Tech history department, while denying him tenure, still kept the whole case mum, allowing Sokolow to continue his career as an academic historian elsewhere.  By the way, in his pathetic attempt at defending himself before his department’s tenure committee, he misspelled plagiarism in the same way it was in this conference’s program.

Sokolow resigned before his department could begin dismissal proceedings against him.  The department even allowed him to withdraw his application for tenure.  No one from the department notified NYU that Sokolow’s dissertation, on which the book had been based, had been plagiarized, and no one informed the editors at Farleigh Dickinson of the fraud.  With his academic sins hidden, Sokolow was able to get a job with NEH as the head reviewer of research proposals by historians who were presumably upholding the principles that he had betrayed.

          Sokolow’s book was finally exposed as the rip off of another and the matter came before the American Historical Association.  The AHA compromised itself by allowing Sokolow to dictate the terms of his penance, which was a substantial errata slip inserted in future copies of his book.  He also continued to work at the NEH for years thereafter. Even the reviewer mentioned above chose to not to reply to what he perceived to be a sell out by his professional organization.  To its credit the AHA published the first part of its Statement on Plagiarism in 1986, the wording of which had strong echoes of the Sokolow case.  Even so Sokolow went ahead and published another book on Fourierism with the University of Kentucky Press even though charges of plagiarism in that MS. were being considered by an AHA committee.

          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” (cited in Mallon, 192), 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” (cited in Mallon, 121).  Arnold Cooper, a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association contends that the plagiarist displays an unconscious “need for public punishment. The person, in one way or another, can be inviting shame” (cited in Mallon, 122).  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 Sokolow 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, Idaho 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, wrote us to say 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 (World, May 1, 2005; WorldMagBlog, Dec. 5, 2007).  It is inconceivable that the examples on this link the result of editing errors. 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 to 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 extension theft 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. 

In conclusion let us 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 Professors 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.

Kidnapping texts may result in more than embarrassment or a fine.  Garrison Keillor reports that Big Messer, a famous cowboy ruffian and poet, once discovered that another gunslinging poet had lifted the word "alas" from one of his own poems.  As Big Messer was bragging to Lefty about how he had dispatched this word thief to Boot Hill, Lefty noticed that the big brute had his most recent poem in his shirt pocket.  Messer did not take kindly to the suggestion that its was not his own work, but Lefty's sidekick Dusty came to his rescue. While Dusty and Messer were punching each other silly, Lefty, sipping on his juice, was able to finish another poem.