Posted on 01/09/2002 6:25:07 AM PST by SJackson
A prizewinning work of history dosen't stand up to examination.
Readers who go back with us as far as September/October 2000 may remember the cover story of that issue, in which I reviewed Michael Bellesiles's book, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. I was badly wrong in my judgment, though it took me a while to grasp just how wrong. And I had plenty of company. My piece turned out to be one of many that praised the book, often in extravagant terms. And many of the reviewers were themselves distinguished historians: Garry Wills, in The New York Times Book Review; Edmund Morgan, in The New York Review of Books; Fred Anderson, in the Los Angeles Times (Anderson's massive history of the Seven Years' War as well as an earlier volume on the Massachusetts militia covered some of the same historical terrain surveyed by Bellesiles); and more.
Bellesiles's principal claim was strongly counterintuitive: guns were much less common in early America than is routinely supposed. Not until the 1830s, he argued, did the beginnings of a substantial gun culture develop in the United States, and that was largely in the context of a new American "sporting culture" on the English model. And even then, it required the industrialization of the arms industry, beginning in the 1840s, and, most crucially, the Civil War to transform Americans into the famously gun-toting people we are today.
But in the course of advancing that central argument, Bellesiles wove many other subjects into his narrative. He made me realize how anachronistic our conceptions of early gun battles tend to be. He sketched the brutal conflict between European settlers and the Indians they dispossessed with unsentimental candor. He persuasively chronicled the general ineffectiveness of the militia in the colonial period and during the Revolution. All this and a good deal more he managed with considerable verve. I found the book to be of unfailing interest, despite its length.
Reaction to Arming America was strong and swift. While Bellesiles declined to spell out any present-day policy implications, the way he framed the story made it clear that he saw it as an argument against the notion that Americans always have been and hence always will be heavily armed. Things were once different; they could be so again. Thus the first volleys came from opponents of gun control, who regarded the entire book as nothing but a Trojan horse.
I heard from some of those people myself after my review appeared. The first batch of responses came from readers of Books & Culture, but subsequent waves came from others who'd been alerted to the review by one of the countless websites maintained by gun-rights absolutists. It was easy to discount most of this criticism, much of it boiling with rage—especially because the letter-writers took it for granted that I was eager to eviscerate the Second Amendment, that I regarded guns as the root of all evil, and so on. On the contrary: I strongly affirm the individual right to bear arms. But I also believe that this right, like other important rights, is subject to regulation for the common good, and I am disgusted by gun-rights absolutists who reject even the most modest of prudent restrictions as diabolical stratagems on the way to a totalitarian state. Undaunted, I proceeded to include Arming America on a list of the ten best books I had read in the year 2000. Bellesiles's book, I said, deserved to win a Pulitzer Prize. It didn't win a Pulitzer, but it did win the prestigious Bancroft Prize, much to be desired among American historians. Meanwhile, criticism of Arming America, mostly posted by amateur historians on the web, continued to mount. And some of it was not so easily dismissed.
One indefatigable researcher, Clayton Cramer, checked a number of Bellesiles' sources and found that Bellesiles's use of them was frequently inaccurate, or slanted, or both. Indeed, the further Cramer dug, the more errors he found. Unlike most readers, for example, he was familiar with some of the 80 or so travel accounts Bellesiles cited, and he reported a disturbing pattern of selectivity and misleading paraphrase. Some of Cramer's criticisms misfired; he treated differences in interpretation as evidence of fraud. And sometimes he seemed to be guilty of distortion himself, as when he described as fraudulent Bellesiles's use of a passage in which George Washington criticized the militia. Cramer's point was that, in the source, Washington was referring to certain militia units only, not the militia in general, as Bellesiles implied. That is true—and Bellesiles's summary was to that degree inaccurate—but Cramer failed to add that there are other widely known examples in which Washington unequivocally criticizes the militia in general in the harshest terms.
Still, in many more cases Cramer presented compelling evidence that Bellesiles repeatedly had distorted what he found in his sources. This was especially the case whenever quantitative evidence was involved. On that front, the most devastating criticism came from James Lindgren, a professor of law at Northwestern University, who with Justin Heather reviewed Bellesiles's use of probate records. Bellesiles used these records to substantiate his claim that gun ownership in early America was much less common than generally believed, and many reviewers had singled out this evidence as particularly persuasive. In their article, "Counting Guns in Early America," Lindgren and Heather not only exposed inexplicable discrepancies between the data they reviewed and Bellesiles's presentation of it but also showed that some glaring errors should have been evident to any reviewers who simply took a closer look at Bellesiles's numbers. I hung my head in shame. In my review I had deliberately not referred to the probate records because I wasn't certain how compelling was the alleged evidence of guns' absence. But that was no excuse for an abject failure to think through the evidence as Bellesiles presented it.
Given these widely aired charges of misuse of evidence and possible fabrication of data, Emory University, Bellesiles's institution, asked him to prepare a formal response. He had been posting piecemeal responses on his website, in some cases conceding that he may have been in error yet without clearly indicating the extent of such "error." Bellesiles's response, "Disarming the Critics," published in the newsletter of the Organization of American Historians, was posted on the OAH website early in November. It was a great disappointment to those who held out hope that he might still mount a credible defense.
What to make of all this? I admit that I am still sorting it out. Some observers have mocked the innumeracy of historians (and reviewers) who gave Bellesiles a free ride, while others have seen sheer laziness. Many commentators have cast the affair in familiar culture-war terms: left-leaning academics obsessed with the evil of guns latch onto a book that panders to their prejudices and acclaim it a path-breaking scholarly achievement, all the while ignoring flagrant errors. Yet, many of the scholars who praised Arming America can't be readily pigeon-holed, nor can the appeal of the book be limited to its ideological payoff. I didn't come to it with an axe to grind. Rather, I allowed myself to be seduced by the thrill of a thesis that overturned common wisdom. Yes, it's important to follow the truth wherever it leads—but for intellectuals there's always a temptation to take pride in being above the fray.
Clayton Cramer and the others who took the trouble to check Bellesiles's sources certainly weren't above the fray. They were convinced that Arming America was wrong, and they set out to prove it, but in doing so they assembled objective evidence. Flattering myself on my objectivity, I didn't practice reasonable skepticism in the face of Bellesiles's provocative claims.
For reasons both good and bad, much is taken on trust in the world of scholarship, despite the ideal of rigorous evaluation. The October 26 issue of Science magazine reported on a forthcoming article in the journal Society revisiting psychologist Stanley Milgram's famous 1967 paper on what has come to be known as the "small world" phenomenon. This study involved sending letters from Kansas or Nebraska to "target" recipients in Massachusetts by a chain of contacts (each person in the chain was to send the letter to someone they knew on a first-name basis); it gave rise to the notion of "six degrees of separation," as popularized in John Guare's play of that title. Judith Kleinfield, a psychologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, contends that Milgram "skewed the results" of the study by omitting uncompleted chains. While Milgram's paper has been frequently cited, it is far less likely to arouse passions than is a history of guns in early America, which may explain—if Kleinfield is right—why the results haven't been more carefully scrutinized in the decades since it was published.
Some have said that whatever the flaws of Arming America, the book has opened up a productive debate. Perhaps, though that remains to be seen. As for Bellesiles himself, the future is unclear, but it seems likely that ultimately his career will be ruined. That is the saddest aspect of this whole episode.
gun-rights absolutist bump.
It just breaks my heart (to hear such sympathy for an overt unethical gun-grabber).
Yeah, like the statement "I did not have sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky" was "inaccurate".
Im disgusted by "intellectuals" who dont understand the concept of a Right.
I propose the following: put the same 'reasonable' restrictions on abortion as we have on guns, call it Abortion Control, and let the arguments begin about what constitutes rights and who truly grants them--Almighty God, or Almighty Government.
If this is Wilson's standard, then he must condemn himself for failing to note the now well-known example in which Bellesiles did not merely misinterpret or distort existing records, but simply made up out of whole cloth the contents of records which were destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake (and resuling fires) of 1906.
Not as much as I'm disgusted by our paper-tiger 'Justice System' which refuses to indict, try and execute sentence on those who openly advocate the destruction of the cornerstone of the Bill of Rights.
The author should be overjoyed to live in this world that he must, with so much 'disgust', endure. In the world that uncompromising Patriots would dish up for him his stated opposition to the 2nd Amendment would be just the sort of thing that capitol crimes are made of.
2 posted on 1/9/02 7:25 AM Pacific by SJackson
Yeah, right. They will remove him from the Classroom and make him a Administrator. Oh the pain.
Yes, it's important to follow the truth wherever it leads?but for intellectuals there's always a temptation to take pride in being above the fray.This is the most hedged, the most qualified, the most self-congratulatory mea culpa I think I have ever read. "... for intellectauls [me, for instance] ..." ... We were only following the truth wherever it leads ...
Not. I consider it the most hopeful aspect.
Just shows how either lacking in common sense - or how willing to lie in pursuit of political agendas - so many "historians" are!
Anyone who'd ever been so much as a secretary in a law office would have noticed the #1 absurdity of Arming America instantly - its claim that probate records indicate ownership of specific items other than land, cars, stock, bank accounts, or boats; after all, every legal secretary knows anything not required to be "titled" somewhere invariably ends up subsumed in a catchall category called "personal effects" in probate records. And any legal secretary - or any factory worker whose failing-in-health father gave him his shotgun as he got unable to hunt anymore before he died - would have immediately noticed its #2 absurdity: assuming that most parents in an era of poor medical care didn't just hand down guns, particularly hunting guns, while alive - thus never ending up in probate!
Academia was extremely willing to turn a blind eye to a professorial liar. After all, enough professors either had themselves been given a shotgun by a father no longer able to hunt with it years before he died and enough profs had wives who were legal secretaries that the book should have been challenged the day it appeared - particularly being that some profs are NRA members and saw some of the NRA's deeper questioning of the Bellesiles book in its magazine frequently.
But the left-leaning ivory tower - like the antigun lobby it shilled for - has no integrity.
Scandals of antigun politicians and activists - and documented debunking of Bellesiles!
As for Bellesiles himself, the future is unclear, but it seems likely that ultimately his career will be ruined.Oh, pur-leeze. You cannot spit on an American campus without hitting a discredited academic. Most wear their disgrace with a perverse pride: only a few academicians ever write anything even worthy to be criticized. Bellesiles will be lauded as the victim of a right wing smear campaign and carry on famously in his new role, that of suffering redeemer.
The cretin committed fraud that dragged how many dozen influential people into believing his lies, not to mention thousands of readers who may still not have gotten the news that the book is bogus and John Wilson thinks the saddest thing is that Bellesiles got caught.
Why would this be sad? Whether Bellesiles allowed himself to be a useful idiot of the Nazi-left or decided to become one on his own is irrelevant - - he screwed around with data in order to support an agenda-driven "conclusion". He then basked in the adulation of the liberal media and the gun control nuts, and sold a decent amount of books.
His career deserves to be ruined.
A bad day for them is a good day for us.
"As for Bellesiles himself, the future is unclear, but it seems likely that ultimately his career will be ruined."
(I just wanted to see this sentence again!)
"_Doctor_ Bellesiles!!! I TOLD YOU I WANTED FRIES WITH THAT!"
"Doctor_ Bellesiles To Aisle 3 with your MOP!"
I fail to understand why it is sad that a fraud is exposed most especially when that fraud is to sskew public policy. Bellesiles had a responsibility as an historian to do honest research any consequences he may face are earned by his falsifying data. As to those who support the individual right to keep and bear arms subject to reasonable regulations I submit that their view of resonable regulation is the view that is held by the VPC and they just plain do not want anyone except their bodygirds to be entitled to carry arms.
Stay well - Stay safe - Stay armed - Yorktown
It may be sadness triggered by support for the message. Kind of the opposite of shooting the messenger.
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