Hitchcock Won’t Correct The Record, So We Will

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

“The Trump movement was in many ways an ecumenical manifestation of the Wanderer Catholic underground of conspiracy theories, old religious and ethnic grudges, economic ignorance, resentment, and alienation from the entire modern world, an amalgam that for a time saw Ron Paul as its messiah and that above all yearned for the emotional release that a demagogue could provide” — James Hitchcock, Abortion, Religious Freedom, and Catholic Politics (Transaction Publishers, 2016, $100).
This fervid charge was the final salvo in Catholic historian James Hitchcock’s last attack on The Wanderer.
We reviewed Hitchcock’s book at length four years ago this week (see link below for the full text), and time has not been friendly to the longtime professor at St. Louis University.
Trump was “almost certain to be defeated by Hillary Clinton. The Republicans might also lose control of the Senate, and the Democrats would therefore be able to cement in place a pro-abortion judiciary that would last for decades.”
But wait, there’s more: “In the unlikely event that Trump should defeat Clinton, he appeared [sic] to lack both the knowledge and the will to address pro-life concerns. It was a tragic ending indeed to the long and courageous pro-life struggle.”
OK, so Trump turned out to be the most pro-life president in history.
Well, no one can be faulted for a cloudy crystal ball. Hitchcock was merely using Trump as a convenient foil for The Wanderer. And this publication had been the target of his histrionic ire long before Donald Trump ever got off that New York escalator in June 2015.
Now let’s face it: For over 150 years, this paper has been attacked. We take it in stride, and graciously. When Hitchcock launched his first barrage some fifteen years ago, The Wanderer gave him over three thousand words to make his case. At the time, he was amiable and professional.
This time around, however, he was not.
On the personal level, the book’s attacks on me were par for the course — according to the Usual Suspects, I’ve been part of the “lunatic fringe” since 1959. But Hitchcock’s error-ridden attack on our colleague Dexter Duggan was unforgivably crude.
I don’t know Mr. Duggan, but I do know that he’s been writing for years and is proud of his record as a journalist. So I’m not surprised that he was appalled when he saw the book’s mangling of his contributions to The Wanderer.
Duggan has recounted some of them in these pages at length, and space prevents us from repeating them here. In brief, Hitchcock consistently tries to assert that Duggan either isn’t pro-life enough or even supports politicians because they’re pro-abortion. To do so, he puts Duggan in meetings Duggan didn’t attend, cherry-picks or distorts Duggan’s articles to repeat the calumny, confuses dates and House votes and more, all to press the book’s overall argument that Mr. Duggan and The Wanderer aren’t sufficiently pro-life.
When Duggan’s articles quote third parties like Rand Paul, Sarah Palin, Pat Buchanan, black activist Ted Hayes, Rob Haney of Arizona’s GOP, or Bob Dornan, Hitchcock implies that their words are in fact Duggan’s. That makes Duggan (in various passages) appear to be anti-Israel, pro-abortion, a poor prophet (in re John McCain 2008), a poor strategist (Santorum 2014 — Hitchcock gets the year wrong), soft on abortion (Huckabee and Romney 2008, Santorum 2015). . . . Duggan’s list goes on.
Four years ago we noted here that Hitchcock’s book was far from ready for publication by any professional standard. So why was it published at all?
Hitchcock was apparently rushing to finish his manuscript in late 2016. Was it because his publisher, Transaction, was being sold? (The 2016 sale became final on February 1, 2017, and Transaction became part of Routledge, of the Taylor & Francis Group. according to Wikipedia).
Buyouts of companies are often conducted with the purchaser’s intention to cut costs and maximize efficiency. Sometimes that involves removing whole levels of management and staff. And therein may lie the problem — and, if so, it wasn’t entirely Jim’s fault. He might not even have known — when he turned in his manuscript — that Transaction was trying to wrap up the sale and the company.
We’ll never know what happened internally with the publisher, but we do know that the book needed editing and proofreading that it didn’t receive. The final version was sloppy throughout.

“I Object!”

Thus read the title of Jim Hitchcock’s whine after the Human Life Review graciously allowed me a response to his lengthy attacks on The Wanderer fourteen years ago.
Now it’s Mr. Duggan’s turn to object.
“Almost everything he writes about me is outright false if not merely seriously misleading,” Mr. Duggan writes. He provides ample proof, line by line.
Now Jim Hitchcock, whom I have known and admired for over forty years, is not The Washington Post or CNN. They’re proud of their slanders.
But Mr. Hitchcock is a gentleman and a scholar. As such, one would expect him to address Mr. Duggan’s concerns.
He won’t.
Mr. Duggan has provided them repeatedly and at length. No reply — from Professor Hitchcock or his publishers.
I have asked Mr. Hitchcock at least to address Mr. Duggan’s misgivings, to rebut them, even to condemn them. I offered him all the space he wanted.
“Thank you, Chris. I intend to get around to responding, but I have been very busy for several months,” he wrote on March 20, 2018.
Since then, no luck.
In the meantime, Hitchcock’s false-flag attacks on Dexter Duggan are on library shelves and classrooms everywhere. After all, a political science prof reviewing the book for the Catholic Social Science Review raved about Hitchcock’s “extensive documentation” and “detailed examination” of his sources.
Who’s not to like it?
And then there’s this.
Had Professor Hitchcock written a screed with so many errors condemning the writings of any of his esteemed academic colleagues, he might have been more careful to begin with. But, with the deed done, I’m quite sure that he would have moved with alacrity to correct the record and apologize, if not out of common courtesy, simply to rescue his sullied reputation.
Jim Hitchcock attacked not only the writing of Dexter Duggan; he maligned Mr. Duggan himself. Was this truly Catholic charity at work in the mind of one of this generation’s most celebrated historians?
I write this in sorrow but in good faith, to set the record straight for a Wanderer writer whom I do not know. A man whom I do know and respect has treated him ungraciously.
Please pray for him.
Our original review of February 17, 2018, can be found at this link: https://bit.ly/Manion_Hitchcock
Wanderer Publisher’s Note: The readers and staff of The Wanderer have been blessed to have Dexter’s articles appear weekly in our newspaper for decades. At this time, Dexter has decided to pursue other interests. We thank Dexter for his reporting and insightful commentary for these many years. Many thanks and Godspeed — Joseph Matt.