The people's voice., 1941-07-30
IN OTHER WORDS

ponder in Joe's technique is that il
seldom fails.
Another thing which bedevilei the
project from the very beginning was
Ironically, the higher wages 1t paid.
To the writer in the state office, strug-
Cling with inadequate and often out
rageous field copy, $40 or $50 a month
was pitiful pay; to the political errand
boy out of luck, welding pick and
shovel in a WPA ditch at $40 a
month, it looked like discrimination
in favor of persons who were often,
he correctly suspected, not a jot
smarter than he. If he still had any
pull, any of the quality known in the
vivid language of labor as suction"
he put it to work. Lo in three weeks
he was on an arts projects too, even
If the only Arts he know were voters
named Arthur. 1t was swell for him
and his family; swell for the poll
ticians who were his bosses; swell
even for the bosses of the politicians.
Only the project suffered.
VI lHtI HiHuTdHCeS W lUe WOTh Ol
the Writer'S Project in Montana were
the vast area to be covered by an
insufficient staff (for a comparable
task the much larger staff of almost
any eastern state would have had to
cover the whole Atlantic seaboard)
lack of funds for travel, which, cou-
pied with lack of good recorded source
material, made checking of much of
the information sent in by careless
and incompetent field workers an ut
ter impossibility; and the consultant
system, which arbitrarily gave greater
weight to the merest assertion of
some pomposity outside the project
than to careful investigation within it.
My own experience with consultants
forever convinced me that it is fatal
to accuracy to accept anyone's word
for anything whatsoever without per-
sonally checking and rechecking it
against all discoverable sources.
Our consultant in history, for ex-
ample, was university teacher whose
professional reputation was no slight
NAAhos w Abt SOii par iii6 DOltS OuG
day, he and | found that we differed
upon a question of fact, and | quoted,
among others, a book written by a
man whose scholarship he did not re-
spect. Neither did /, for that matter;
but this was a detail which he did
Tended that he brought the matter up
in an address to the office staff In
using facts which were already re-
corded, he argued, we were guilty of
we ought rather to de-
pend on original research. But he did
not say it quite so politely as that
1t happens to be true that plagiar-
ism was one of the projects big prob
lems-a really colossal pain in the
editorial neck. We could never be
sure that he stuff which came in was
not copied verbatim from some previ-
Gus publication; and the only remedy
we had was to rewrite everything. The
remarks were neverthe-
less beside the point, for to cur job
original research was incidental. Our
prime duty was to tell nearly COM
plete story in a very small space; we
could alter the presentation of fact,
but we could not reject a pertinent
fact merely because someone else had
noticed 1t, nor could we include incon-
sequentialities merely because we had
discovered them. He must have known
this. Perhaps an explanation lay in
the fact that he was working on a
book of his own. Perhaps he brought
up the question of plagiarism because
ne wished, in a precautionary sort of
way, to make 1t known that he had
heard of the thing, understood what
It was, and regarded it with disap-
proval.
The quality of his scholarship is in
1icated by his article on Montana in
The Encyclopedia Britannica q3th ed,
V. 30), which contains some errors
that schoolboy of average intelli-
gence could point out without much
trouble. Now, if man, whatever his
reputation, writes care
essly for the Britannica, it is fair to
ask what conceivable circumstances
Of composition and publication could
Inspire him to accuracy.
Conclusion next week.