The-Ave.US

It’s okay to lie through your teeth when you’re running for public office, but not when you’re publishing historical research. Funny how that works, isn’t it? Maybe we should require politicians to be truthful and let academics get away with whoppers because nobody reads their monographs anyway. But I digress.

We’d all like to make a big splash, or at least a little ripple, in our chosen field. That’s human nature. So what keeps researchers, journalists, and corporate accountants from making things up to advance their careers? Nothing, sometimes. I won’t bother to give examples because you probably can think of some off the top of your head.

Thomas Lowry, 78, a retired psychiatrist and Lincoln researcher who has written several books about the Civil War era, couldn’t resist the impulse to make a splash.

The vehicle for Lowry’s moment of fame was a presidential pardon for one Patrick Murphy, a California volunteer who deserted from the Union Army and was sentenced to be shot. Lincoln let Murphy off the hook on insanity grounds. Yeah, anyone who runs away from a shooting war is crazy, all right. Everyone knows wars are fun. That’s why we have so many of them. But I digress.

By coincidence, Lincoln signed Murphy’s pardon on April 14, 1864, exactly one year before he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth in Ford’s Theater. A fact which did not escape Lowry’s attention when he found Murphy’s pardon in the National Archives.

Lowry must have felt disappointed at first. If the pardon had been signed a year later, on the day Lincoln was shot, it might have been Lincoln’s last official act. And Lowry would get credit for finding a document of historical significance. Then Lowry got to thinking ….

The temptation was too much to resist.

Lowry erased the “4” in “1864” and penned in a “5” so it would read “1865.” Then he announced his “discovery” to the world. It made a splash. The Murphy pardon went on public tour. And Lowry basked in the kind of recognition that comes to, say, an amateur astronomer who discovers a new comet. It probably helped him sell his books, too. There’s always money mixed up in these things somehow.

Well, Lowry got caught, and although he can’t be prosecuted for vandalizing a National Archives document — because the statute of limitations has expired — he’s banned from the Archives for life and his reputation is in tatters. That seems like a small sanction; if he’d done this to a royal decree in Saudi Arabia, his writing hand would be missing, and if we extend that concept a bit I can readily visualize politicians without tongues, but I digress.

Lowry did more than vandalize a publicly-owned document of trivial historical significance. He vandalized history. He rewrote history. He told a lie. He did it to draw attention to himself and to advance his career.

Academics and journalists face this kind of temptation almost every day, yet except for an occasional rogue, they never succumb to it. That tells you something about the strength of character of our academics and journalists.

When ambition takes a back seat to character, well, that takes a lot of character; and nearly all the honest-to-God researchers and journalists toiling in our universities and press have it. And nobody thinks that’s remarkable. I point this out because maybe the rest of us don’t appreciate these people enough.

Lowry is an example of what happens to a weak character when ambition collides with intellectual honesty. It collapses and truth is compromised.

I’m not an academic, so I don’t know what safeguards (if any) are in place to protect intellectual honesty from the temptations spawned by ambition. Maybe someone else can answer that. All I know is, human nature being what it is, ambition is a powerful force. In the wrong hands, more powerful than fidelity to truth.

But in the right hands, the truth is perfectly safe, because of the unwritten code of reseachers and journalists everywhere: You never, ever, tell a lie. So, how do we extend that system to politicians?  I have an idea, but … I digress.