I should have known better

On my most recent trip to the library, I made the mistake of checking out To America, a collection of essays by Stephen Ambrose.  I should have known better. I have written before about being disappointed by Ambrose. This book annoyed me even more.

To America is as I expected a collection of essays in which Ambrose muses on his life in general, how he decided to major in history at the University of Wisconsin back when dinosaurs roamed the earth (the 1950's), and how he stumbled into military history and succumbed to being a proponent of the Great Man Theory. Well, he doesn't actually come right out and say he deliberately decided to become an acolyte at the altar of the Great Man Theory, the if it wasn't for heroes like Eisenhower/Lincoln/whoever we'd all be screwed explanation for everything, but in essence that's what happened. He's also a huge believer in Destiny and the inevitably of progress.

This in itself would not be a terrible thing. Lots of people think that because things turned out a certain way, that's the only way things could have gone. You know, certain things were meant to be, there was no alternative. These people have not read enough Harry Turtledove books. Or, for that matter, any other alternative history. Nothing is inevitable. History is full of "what ifs?" There's a reason people talk about "turning points" in history -- those are the obvious times and events when things could have gone in a different direction. That doesn't mean they had to go in the direction they did; we just think it was inevitable because it's the result we've been living with.

Small digression: one minor example of an event that would have easily changed history as we know it. By coincidence, I am currently reading a biography of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He was the second son, not even really eyed as a spare by his father. What if his older brother, Joseph P. Kennedy jr, hadn't died in action during World War II? Would JFK have bothered with politics?

No, what makes the belief in inevitability a Terrible Thing is Ambrose uses this sense of predestination, of it was meant to be, of (dare we say it?) Manifest Destiny to do a lot of jingoistic we are the best, the brightest, the greatest country on the planet because we inadvertently killed off the indigenous population, defeated evil doers like Hitler, and did our best to contain the Communist menace in Vietnam. After all, when Europeans came to the Americas, the natives weren't really civilized; they needed to be colonized and/or eliminated so the United States could be the great shining beacon of hope the rest of the world reveres today. He even manages to claim that the Europeans never practiced genocide, that all the indigenous deaths were the tragic but inevitable result of accidental exposure to disease.

And then there are the bloopers, like describing Tet as a "religious holiday." What the fuck, dude, it's the lunar New Year in Vietnam. How much research would it have taken for this supposedly great historian to have found out it's the first word in the Vietnamese phrase "tet nguyen dan," or feast of the first morning on the first day of the new year. It's celebrated by everyone -- Catholics, Buddhists, animists, whatever -- in Vietnam. It is not a specifically religious holiday any more than New Year's Day is any place else on the planet. I've been hearing Tet described as the lunar new year since Americans first got to hear the word back in 1968. Surely somewhere there's video of American newscasters talking about the Vietnamese launching surprise attacks during the New Year holiday?

His view on Vietnam, incidentally, is that if we'd just turned the generals loose and let them do their jobs the U.S. would have won that war. Right. More likely it would be like Afghanistan is now -- stuck there forever and reading more and more like a bad copy of a Joe Haldeman novel.

Bottom line: I'm avoiding Stephen Ambrose books in the future. Part of me has been thinking for years that I should read Undaunted Courage, but given that I already know quite a bit about the Lewis & Clark expedition I'm thinking now that wouldn't be a good idea. If I'm catching weirdness in the Ambrose books on topics where my knowledge is relatively superficial, I shudder to think what I'd find in a book where I'm already fairly well-read.

Sloppy scholarship

I started reading a book last night penned by one of America's best known "historians," Stephen E. Ambrose. The book, Nothing Like It in the World, is a description of the construction of the transcontinental railway from Council Bluffs, Iowa, to Sacramento, California. I'm not very far into it, but it's definitely readable. It's the first of Ambrose's books I've read (I managed somehow to escape Undaunted Courage, his book about the Lewis and Clark expedition), but I can see why he managed to turn histories into best sellers. Ambrose is good with words.

Too bad he's not as good with his scholarship. I've already run into something that helps explain some of the scorn I've heard expressed by academicians regarding Ambrose's books. I know the Civil War isn't his area (Eisenhower and World War II were his first big love), but even I know that saying Shiloh was Grant's first victory is flatout wrong. But that's what Ambrose does -- apparently his vast herd of minions, the various people serving as his researchers (which appears to be his extended family, i.e., his adult children), somehow managed to skip right over Fort Donelson.  The fall of Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland opened the way south, as well as providing a tremendous morale boost to the Union. 

I hate finding bloopers like this in books, especially really early on in a book. Nothing Like It in the World is sufficiently interesting that I'm going to keep reading, but Ambrose's slip regarding Grant and  Shiloh means I'm now going to be a little bit skeptical about everything he describes.