The View From Kalamazoo

I don’t think I need to explain why I’m just *floored* by this. Disgusted, amazed, FLOORED. I commented about it briefly on my other blog, but this is really the place for it.

From the issue dated June 27, 2003, By Scott McLemee

Seeing Red

Philip Foner influenced a generation of young labor historians, but critics call him a plagiarist who helped himself to their research (full piece here)

“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charging that Foner’s book The Case of Joe Hill (International Publishers, 1965) contained extensive plagiarism from an unpublished master’s thesis that Mr.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…”

and more, from another source:

Melvyn Dubofsky: “…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).” (read the rest here.)