Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,792

This is the grave of Stephen Ambrose.

Born in 1936 in Lovington, Illinois, Ambrose grew up middle class, the son of a doctor who was in the Navy as a medic in World War II. He grew up mostly in Whitewater, Wisconsin, where he graduated from high school in 1954. It was onto the University of Wisconsin, where he became a history major after taking a class from the 19th century historian William Hesseltine, one of the most important mid-century historians of the United States. Ambrose became addicted to the topic and went to Louisiana State for a master’s degree before coming back to Madison for the PhD under Hesseltine, which he finished in 1963.

At first, Ambrose was a serious scholar. His book on Henry Halleck was as well respected as any other first monograph upon its 1962 publication. Ambrose’s interest in military history was hardly out of fashion at that time. He had a critical mind too, at least early on. In fact, in 1970, he was a visiting professor at Kansas State. He protested Richard Nixon’s visit to that school over the war and was asked to leave his position early. But he was firmly at the University of New Orleans by this time and his politics soon shifted to the right too. See, Ambrose was an early purveyor of what Tom Brokaw would later call “The Greatest Generation.” The idea is complete ahistorical nonsense, but Ambrose seems to have idolized his father and so started shifting from his solid early work on the Civil War to big themed books on World War II that would sell a lot of a copies.

Now, before we go further here, let’s address one of the defenses of Ambrose–that historians were jealous of his sales. There’s probably some truth there, but it’s complicated by two factors. The first is that late 20th century historians were seemingly told to write as poorly as possible. This is part of the nefarious influence of social “science,” where it seems that fields such as political science now try to write as opaquely as possible to ensure that it is seen as scientific. Numbers! Regression analysis! Please understand here that I am not taking shots at my political science colleagues here at LGM, none of who write in this way and all of whom avoid the quantification nonsense. But let’s take the political science departments at many, many institutions, including some that, uh, I know very well, they are filled stem to stern with quant people. If you want to know anything about American politics from someone at these schools, you need to talk to the 20th century scholars in the History Department. If you go back and read histories from the 70s and 80s, they are largely filled with jargon. It got a little better by the 90s, when the field decided it wasn’t going to run regression analyses instead of focusing on the words of real people doing real things, but the books are still way too long, filled with too much detail, and in desperate need of editing. So, yes, Ambrose rejected this entirely and tried to write books that people would read. Fair.

But the second part of historians’ distrust of Ambrose was that he told utterly uncritical stories that were more like hagiographies than actual histories that dealt with the complexities of the American past. So sure, they didn’t have the ability to write like he did, but they also thought he was a charlatan in what he wrote, not how he wrote it. He didn’t care. He started sucking up to Dwight Eisenhower and wrote a ton of books about him, starting with Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945: The Decision to Halt at the Elbe, in 1967. Much of Ambrose’s fame came out of the Eisenhower books but here was the problem too. Sucking up to Eisenhower, well, OK, I mean access is a thing and if you want to be a historian of a guy who still lives, I can see why you’d do that. I mean, I wouldn’t, but I’m not that kind of historian. Ike died in 1969. That led to Ambrose pouring out book after book about Eisenhower. 1970 saw The Supreme Commander: The War Years of Dwight D. Eisenhower. He did a giant two volume biography in the early 80s, a book on Eisenhower’s relationship with spies, and then some other books over the years about Eisenhower and the war. Through all of this, Ambrose talked up his long and fruitful relationship with Ike. He wouldn’t shut up about it. And this is what made Ambrose famous. As the World War II generation aged out, their kids became completely suckers for nostalgia as their lazy hippie asses hadn’t done anything like their great parents and they felt bad about it (say what you will about my own stereotype here, it absolutely drove the Greatest Generation bullshit and in fact was quite similar to what we saw in the 1890s and 1900s as the Civil War generation began to diee out and their kids became fanatical about how manly and wonderful their fathers were compared to their own weak asses then).

But Ambrose made it all up. Total fabricator. He did meet with Eisenhower–briefly. That was it. In 1998, he had stated, “a lot of time with Ike, really a lot, hundreds and hundreds of hours.” The true answer was between 4 and 5 hours. Eisenhower’s own personal schedule, meticulously detailed for decades, shows this. It’s amazing–what historian just ignores the primary sources that they know will implicate them?!? This got people’s attention and they started backchecking. Ambrose made up some of his histories out of whole cloth. He simply lied to make money off suckers wanting the right kind of history of their nighttime reading. Today, historians simply don’t read Ambrose. You can’t trust any of it is true. His work on Eisenhower especially is completely discredited. You can’t cite it and be taken seriously.

The other thing that kills me here is how you as a historian come to the decision to just make shit up. When does that happen? How do you have such low standards of professional conduct? Ambrose didn’t really have a political axe to grind, I mean he turned into a pretty small-c conservative guy, but that’s almost exactly the kind of person who you might think would not pull a stunt like this. I guess it’s the money. And Ambrose brought in a lot of it. The other thing about this is that while scholars had long looked at Ambrose’s Eisenhower books with skepticism, none of this really came out until after he died.

Meanwhile, Ambrose just made bank. He started churning out a book a year, the perfect gift for Republican Daddies, which very well might mean your own father. These were all on subjects just perfect for daddy. He moved on in the late 80s to start working on Nixon, and soon came a 2 volume biography. Then he realized the endless market for World War II books and wrote Band of Brothers, which really fed into the World War II fetish held by American men and inspired the show on HBO. That was in 92. In 94 came his D-Day book. In 96, he published Undaunted Courage, about the Lewis & Clark Expedition, which was a big seller too. There were other examples of white men doing white men things that Ambrose could sell for profit. In 97, he published Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany. The same year came Americans at War. Then the next year was another book on Eisenhower and the soldiers in World War II. By this time, Americans were in full Greatest Generation wankery and Ambrose wasn’t going to let a buck go by.

In 2000, he wrote a book on the Transcontinental Railroad that really got the attention of historians for being terrible, filled with factual inaccuracies. Soon after came accusations of plagiarism. Ambrose denied this. I think he’s probably telling the truth, to a point. See, here’s the thing–you can’t write that much. It’s really not possible, not if you are doing any of the research yourself. And I very much doubt Ambrose was doing any research at all by this time. I am sure he had teams, quite possibly made up of graduate students, who were doing that. They probably were a bit sloppy and Ambrose was most certainly not spending any time fact checking. He was putting out trash books and making of ton of money selling to white men. That was the grift. If standards had to decline, then they decline. So Ambrose is definitely at fault here, but I doubt it was intentional. As one historian put it, “The research might best be characterized as ‘once over lightly.'” That’s sums it up.

On a related note, I am a hard worker and write a lot. I know what it takes to write a lot. There’s simply no way Ambrose was doing this without a factory behind him. In the contemporary context, I assume the same of Jill Lepore. She’s a better historian than Ambrose ever could have dreamed of being, even though she’s incredibly full of herself and her claims that she’s the only historian really engaging in the public despite ignoring the fact that huge chunks of the profession does this today. And she’s also selling a similar schtick as Ambrose, but to a different audience. As Richard White put it in his review of These Truths, a deeply flawed one volume of the U.S. where class is never worth discussing and Native people don’t exist after conquest, she’s hawking New Yorker history, though I’d put it more accurately as NPR history, for even though she’s the New Yorker staff historian, her audience is broader than that and NPR listeners and eat this stuff up because she basically tells them stories they want to read about both the past and present. Well, anyone engaging in the public does this to some extent, except maybe me, whose schtick is to tell my readers the histories they don’t want to hear, whether with lefties reading my books and whining that I don’t like anarchists or think that the General Strike is around the corner if only the Dems would stand up for The People or liberals over here. In any case, there’s simply no way Lepore can write as much as she does by herself. It’s just not possible. Not to mention that she has at least one child.

By the end of his life, Ambrose was pretty well discredited in the field, but what did he care. He could give talks to white men for huge amounts of money. When he died in 2002, of lung cancer caused by having a horrible cigarette habit, at the age of 66, the state of Mississippi named the portion of I-10 that runs through the state the Stephen Ambrose Highway. Oh, you can imagine how much I enjoyed that. As much as I enjoyed writing this grave post about this terrible historian. The jealousy of Ambrose in the end was not that he sold books. It’s that the books were so bad and yet stupid white men wanking off to World War II ate them up.

Stephen Ambrose is buried in Gardens of Memory Memorial Park, Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.

If you would like this series to visit other historians who reached out into the public, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Frederick Jackson Turner is in Madison, Wisconsin and Barbara Tuchman is in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.