Critic's Corner

McDonough and Jones’ War So Terrible

By Stephen Davis · Originally published April 2018 · p. 34

In the late 1980s, the literature of the Atlanta Campaign was adolescent indeed. Richard McMurry had written a short account of the campaign for a National Park Service booklet in 1972. The next year Samuel Carter III’s The Siege of Atlanta, 1864 offered a lively narrative, but flawed by occasional factual errors. Before then, one had to go back to 1882 to find a book-length study of the campaign (Union Gen. Jacob Cox’s Atlanta). In 1987 we Atlantans were therefore pleased when James Lee McDonough and James Pickett Jones’ War So Terrible: Sherman and Atlanta appeared (New York: W.W. Norton). We hailed it at the time as the first book on the campaign written by professional historians. (Dr. McDonough taught at Pepperdine University in California; Prof. Jones was at

Florida State.) In a review published in the local newspaper, I hailed War So Terrible as both informed and entertaining. The authors explained how Sherman managed to cow and outflank Joe Johnston back from Dalton to Atlanta, then beat John Bell Hood to take the city. I didn’t fault the authors for their praise of Sherman when they claimed, “from the standpoint of strategy, logistics, and communications, the general had no superior on either side of the war; possibly no equal.” On closer inspection, though, I noticed a problem. In reading McDonough and Jones’ account of the big snowball battle, March 22, 1864, which entertained Confederate soldiers in camps near Dalton, I realized that they had lifted, without quotes or attribution, exact phrasing from an article I had written and that was published in Civil War Times Illustrated in June 1976. War So Terrible offered no footnotes or endnotes, so I guess the authors were covered; only writers who recognized their work in the book would notice the plagiarism. I talked with my friend Richard McMurry about the problem; he then found instances of unattributed verbatim borrowing from his doctoral dissertation on the Atlanta Campaign (Emory University, 1967). After I pointed this out in a book review published in Atlanta History, the local quarterly, Bradley Rice, editor of the journal, wrote the legal department of W.W. Norton, informing them of what I had discovered. Dr. Rice later stated in an “Editor’s Note” in the journal that he had written Norton, “expressing the Atlanta Historical Society’s concern about the matter.” Brad gave me a copy of his letter, in which he pointed out something I had not seen. “The Atlanta Historical Society is particularly concerned about the annotated bibliography [of War So Terrible], substantial parts of which appear to be lifted without attribution from ‘A Reader’s Guide to the Atlanta Campaign’ which Davis and McMurry prepared for the Fall 1984 (vol. 28, no. 3) issue of our quarterly, The Atlanta Historical Journal, now known as Atlanta History: A Journal of Georgia and the South.” “Surely authors of McDonough’s and Jones’ experience and reputations,” Rice complained, “cannot argue that such extensive lifting was done as a result of carelessness or naiveté. To add insult to injury, McDonough and Jones’ bibliography does not even include a citation to the Davis and McMurry ‘Reader’s Guide’ from which they took so much.”

By that time, June 1988, Civil War Times, which Richard had contacted about my allegation, had also complained to Norton. Word spread through the historical community. In the summer of 1988, I even heard that Prof. Tom Connelly was going to sue McDonough and Jones for their lifting of his material, but I don’t think anything came of that rumor.

Dr. McMurry, by chance, reviewed McDonough and Jones’ book for the prestigious Journal of Southern History. He credited the authors for good writing, but “unfortunately,” he added, “they have chosen many of these passages from their sources and incorporated them verbatim, or almost verbatim, in their text without benefit of quotation marks.” Richard gave lengthy examples, offering in twin columns quoted text from my CWTI article on the Confederates’ snowball battle and the War So Terrible text (page 63) which borrowed it without mentioning me. He also showed, again mirrored against each other, columns from his doctoral dissertation and how McDonough and Jones had employed his writing without attribution to him. Richard closed his critique by quoting from GWTW: “Ironically, it is a line from Mammy in the movie version of Gone with the Wind that best serves as an epitaph for War So Terrible. ‘It ain’t fittin’,’ she said, ‘it jest ain’t fittin’.’”

At the end of McMurry’s book review, printed in May 1989, the editor of the JSH appended a note: “W. W. Norton & Co. has withdrawn War So Terrible from publication since this review was written. However, because the book remains in wide circulation the Journal has chosen to publish the review.”

That was indeed the case. Civil War Times Illustrated, based upon McDonough and Jones’ plagiarism of my article in their magazine, had filed legal complaint and won a judgment that led Norton to agree to cease publication of War So Terrible. It’s still in effect, I gather, for you can only buy used copies of the book online.

Since the imbroglio of 1987–89, the whole affair has made “history.” A writer in The West Tennessee Historical Society Papers noted that War So Terrible “has recently received much criticism” for its alleged plagiarism. Noting that Norton had discontinued publication of the book, the article also stated that in the August 1989 issue of the Journal of Southern History, Professor McDonough had published a statement expressing regret “that mistakes were made by him in the portion of the book he was responsible for,” and in which he “totally exonerates Jones of any blame for mistakes that were made.” I later learned from Professor Jones which chapters McDonough had written (1, 3, 5–7, 9, 14). Sure enough, I found my lifted text about the Dalton snow fight in Chapter 3.

I decided to write this column not to dredge up a decades-old scholars’ spat. Rather, I wish to address young readers and writers out there, who might dismiss plagiarism—the unauthorized and unattributed use of other writers’ work—as something trivial.

It isn’t.

Stephen Davis of Cumming, Ga., is Book Review Editor for Civil War News. He is currently writing a study of how the Atlanta Intelligencer, the city’s leading daily newspaper, covered the war, 1861–1865. His co-author is Bill Hendrick, veteran journalist of forty years, writing for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Associated Press and many other publications. Their book will be published by the University of Tennessee Press.