Being Hubert Howe Bancroft: Bancroft's History Company and the Scandal of Collaboration

Hubert Howe Bancroft, the proprietor of the San Francisco based History Company, concluded his historical series The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft with its thirty-ninth and final volume Literary Industries (1890), a memoir focused on his labors as an historian. Just three years later, Bancroft’s longtime friend and librarian Henry Oak published the scandalous rebuttal Literary Industries in a New Light (1893), in which he claimed to have written seven and a half of the series’ volumes and credited several of Bancroft’s other assistants with having ghostwritten many more. But why did it take Oak until the thirty-ninth volume to recognize that Bancroft’s name—not his—appeared on the spines and title pages of the books? Oak and the other assistants had been complicit in the misrepresentation of the authorship of the Works for years. In fact, before Oak wrote Literary Industries in a New Light he had written a chapter of Literary Industriesin which he—writing as Bancroft the memoirist—had explained and extolled the company’s collaborative writing system, praising himself in the third person.

This paper will trace the trajectory of collaboration in the History Company’s inner workings and public image by comparing Oak’s original chapter describing the relationships between Bancroft and his assistants, Bancroft’s version of that chapter, and Oak’s published reassertion of the assistants’ efforts. Comparing those accounts will offer a window into the intimate relationships inherent in networked science. The juxtaposition also promises to reveal how two people—one the prominent figure whose name was on the line among the emerging professional community for good or ill, the other a mere laborer in search of the smallest public recognition—attempted to cast the History Company’s image in the best light either by obfuscating or by highlighting collaboration, respectively.