NY Times: Historian's Prizewinning Book on Guns Is Embroiled in a Scandal (Bellesiles)

Only a year ago, Michael A. Bellesiles was well on his way to becoming an academic superstar. He had just published a book with a startling thesis: very few people owned working guns in colonial America. Stepping into the ferocious national debate over guns and the meaning of the Second Amendment, Mr. Bellesiles, a history professor at Emory University in Atlanta, caused a sensation. Legal scholars said his prize-winning book could influence federal court cases challenging gun laws; gun-control advocates championed the research as proof that America's gun culture is, as Mr. Bellesiles put it, "an invented tradition"; angry gun owners saw it as an insidious attack, a calculated effort to prove that the Constitution's framers could not have intended the "right to bear arms" to apply to individuals if so few people owned them.

Now many of Mr. Bellesiles's defenders have gone silent. Over the past year a number of scholars who have examined his sources say he has seriously misused historical records and possibly fabricated them. They say the outcome, when all the evidence is in, could be one of the worst academic scandals in years.

Mr. Bellesiles (pronounced buh-LEEL) has denied that the errors in "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture" are more serious than the ones found in any lengthy and serious work of scholarship, and he has repeatedly said the attacks against him are politically motivated. Mr. Bellesiles, who owns five guns and likes to shoot skeet and target-shoot in his spare time, said he never intended his book to become a cause célèbre for gun control advocates. "When I saw that the flap copy said, 'This is the N.R.A.'s worst nightmare,' I was horrified," he said. "I feel like I'm a historian who accidentally stepped into a minefield."

Indeed, after the National Rifle Association alerted its members about the book, Mr. Bellesiles said, he began receiving hate mail and threats by phone, e-mail, fax and letter. He was forced to get an unlisted number and to change his e-mail address, he said. Earlier this year, two American historical societies passed special resolutions condemning the harassment.

Without doubt, Mr. Bellesiles's research would not have received such careful scrutiny if he had not stepped into the politically and ideologically charged struggle over guns. Yet the scholars who have documented serious errors in Mr. Bellesiles's book — many of them gun-control advocates — do not appear to have any sort of political agenda.

They were struck by his claim to have studied more than 11,000 probate records in 40 counties around the country. He found that between 1765 and 1790, only 14 percent of estate inventories listed guns, and "over half (53 percent) of these guns were listed as broken or otherwise defective." Those claims are featured prominently in the book and were cited in many positive reviews as the core of its argument.

But those who tried to examine the research soon found that they could not, because most of Mr. Bellesiles's records, he said, had been destroyed in a flood. The records they could check showed an astonishing number of serious errors, almost all of them seemingly intended to support his thesis. In some cases his numbers were off by a factor of two, three or more, said Randolph Roth, a history professor at Ohio State University.

To use one example: in his book, Mr. Bellesiles writes that of 186 probate inventories from Providence, R.I., recorded between 1680 and 1730, "all for property-owning adult males," only 90 mention some form of gun, and more than half the guns were "evaluated as old and of poor quality."

At least three scholars have independently examined the same archive and found that 17 of the estates in question were owned by women; that some estates lacked inventories, and that of those that had them, a much higher percentage than Mr. Bellesiles reported contained guns; and that only 9 percent of the guns were evaluated as old and of poor quality.

"The number and scope of the errors in Bellesiles's work are extraordinary," Mr. Roth said. They go well beyond the probate record data, he added, affecting Mr. Bellesiles's interpretation of militia returns, literary documents and many other sources.

Confronted with serious errors in his research, Mr. Bellesiles has acknowledged that there are problems with the way he used probate record data, and he even made some changes in the paperback edition that came out earlier this year. But he said that the data were only a small part of the book. "I wish I had taken them out entirely," he said.

Jack Rakove, a Stanford University historian who has been supportive of "Arming America," agreed: "The book raises a host of interesting questions about the role firearms have played in American life and culture, and it goes well beyond the probate data."

But Mr. Rakove conceded that he had not looked at the research that has been questioned, and he said it was important that Mr. Bellesiles respond to his critics more fully than he has so far.

Mr. Bellesiles's failure to explain himself has led to the most serious accusations against him, which were outlined in The Boston Globe this fall. Earlier this year, when the criticism of his book became more intense, he asked Mr. Roth to help him defend himself. Mr. Roth wrote back, saying that if Mr. Bellesiles would tell him what records he looked at in Vermont, he would go to the archive on his own time, and that if the records matched, he would defend him. Mr. Bellesiles never responded to that offer, Mr. Roth said.

Those who have pressed him hardest for details say they have been led on a bizarre scholarly car chase, with Mr. Bellesiles offering new memories about where he got his records as soon as the old ones were discredited.

He has said from the start that he took notes on the thousands of colonial-era probate records with tick marks in pencil on yellow legal pads. That fact alone was surprising to many of his fellow historians, who tend to use a database when working with such large amounts of information.

Almost all of those notebooks were destroyed when his office at Emory was flooded in May 2000, Mr. Bellesiles said.

James Lindgren, a professor at Northwestern University Law School and by far the most thorough of Mr. Bellesiles's critics, asked him last year where he had done his research on probate records. Mr. Bellesiles responded with a number of locations, including the San Francisco Superior Court, where he said he had found probate records from the 1850's.

Mr. Lindgren, who has done extensive work in probate data, called the courthouse and was told that all the records for that decade were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire. They were not available in two other Bay Area libraries, either. Mr. Bellesiles now says he must have done the research somewhere else and cannot remember where.

But Kathy Beals, former director of the California Genealogical Society, who has worked extensively with probate records from that era, said: "Nobody knows of those records being in existence, and if they are, there are hundreds of people who would like to look at them."

In September, Mr. Bellesiles offered a new defense. Mr. Lindgren and a reporter from The Globe, David Mehegan, found additional serious errors on Mr. Bellesiles's Web site, where he had been posting probate records in an attempt to replace what he said had been lost in the flood. He conceded the errors and responded to The Globe, and later said someone had altered his Web site, presumably a computer hacker.

But several scholars, including one of Mr. Bellesiles's colleagues at Emory, said they doubted that story. Robert A. Paul, the interim dean at Emory College, said, "I can neither independently confirm nor deny that Professor Bellesiles's Web site was hacked."

In September, James Melton, the chairman of the Emory history department, asked Mr. Bellesiles to write a "reasoned, measured, detailed, point by point response to your critics" in an appropriate professional forum. Mr. Bellesiles did publish a response in the November issue of the Organization of American Historians newsletter, but it focused on harassment rather than charges of serious misconduct.

Mr. Bellesiles's supporters have said they expect a fuller response to emerge in a special issue of the William and Mary Quarterly to be published next month.. A draft of the lengthy response Mr. Bellesiles wrote for that issue, supplied by the journal's editor, concedes some mistakes and challenges others, but leaves many serious errors unaddressed.

It is not clear what will happen to Mr. Bellesiles or his book if the scholarly community reaches a consensus that "Arming America" is a seriously flawed or even fraudulent book. The Emory College dean, Mr. Paul, said, "If there were scholarly fraud, we would take that very seriously." Alan Brinkley, the chairman of the history department at Columbia University, said similar questions had never been raised about a book that had won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy. Although there has been no discussion of disciplining Mr. Belles iles or revoking the prize, a spokesman for Jonathan R. Cole, the provost and dean of faculties at Columbia University, said he had distributed copies of the documents detailing Mr. Bellesiles's mistakes to this year's three Bancroft jurors and asked them to examine it.

NEW YORK TIMES
September 10, 2000
Sunday, Late Edition - Final
Section 7; Page 5; Book Review Desk
Spiking the Gun Myth

Before the Civil War, a historian finds, guns were rare in the United States.

ARMING AMERICA: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. By Michael A. Bellesiles.

REVIEWED By GARRY WILLS

BOOK EXCERPT

"The gun is so central to American identity that the nation's history has been meticulously reconstructed to promote the necessity of a heavily armed American public. In the classic telling, arms ownership has always been near universal, and American liberty was won and maintained by the actions of privately armed citizens. The gun culture has been read from the present into the past. Franklin Orth, executive vice president of the NRA, told a Senate subcommittee in 1968, 'There is a very special relationship between a man and his gun -- an atavistic relation with its deep roots in prehistory, when the primitive man's personal weapon, so often his only effective defense and food provider, was nearly as precious to him as his own limbs.' What, then, of the man who does not have such a special relationship with his gun? What kind of man is he? And even more frightening, what if we discover that early American men did not have that special bond with their guns?"
-- from the Introduction to 'Arming America'

For many Americans, the gun is a holy object, the emblem and guarantor of their identity. Without it, they would not be the self-sufficient persons they consider themselves, the very models for all lovers of freedom. To take away this external prop would tear out of them their very essence. This private conviction is verified, in their eyes, by a public fact -- that American history, separateness and virtue have always been associated with the gun, if (in fact) they did not take their very essence from it.

Imagine, then, the shock if this star of the show should turn out to be missing through much of our history. It seems impossible; and that was the reaction of Michael A. Bellesiles, a Colonial historian at Emory University, when -- while searching through over a thousand probate records from the frontier sections of New England and Pennsylvania for 1763 to 1790 -- he found that only 14 percent of the men owned guns, and over half of those guns were unusable.

What happened to the gun we ''know'' was over every mantel, the omnipresent hunting weapon, the symbol of the frontier? Bellesiles looked elsewhere, examined many different kinds of evidence, trying to find where the famous guns were hiding. ''Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture'' tells us what he learned: that individually owned guns were not really in hiding; they were barely in existence. Before the Civil War, the cutoff point for this study, the average American had little reason to go to the expense and trouble of acquiring, mastering and maintaining a tool of such doubtful utility as a gun.

In the Colonial period, the gun meant the musket, an imported item that cost the equivalent of two months pay for a skilled artisan. Without constant attention its iron rusted, and blacksmiths were ill equipped to repair it (they shoed horses and made plows). The musket was not efficient for self-defense or hunting. It was not accurate beyond a few hundred feet (it had no sight, and soldiers were instructed not to aim, since volleys relied on mass impact). It frequently misfired and was cumbersome to reload, awkward qualities for individual self-defense; by the time you had put ball and powder back in, your foe would be upon you with knife, club or ax. Most murders were committed with knives, and -- contrary to the myth of primitive violence -- there were few murders outside Indian warfare (in North Carolina, on the average, there was only one murder every two years between 1663 and 1740).

The same factors that made the musket ineffective for self-defense made it practically useless for hunting. Scare the rabbit with one inaccurate shot (which threw out dense smoke), and all game would be gone by the time you got out ball and powder and deployed them properly. Besides, most Americans were farmers, with no time to maintain expensive guns for hunting when domestic animals (chickens and pigs) were the easily available sources of protein. That is why no American factories were created to make guns.

If most individuals did not own guns, where were the weapons for the militia? The state was supposed to supply them, but rarely did. In 1754, there were only enough guns to arm a sixth of the eligible militiamen. ''In 1758 Connnecticut owned 200 firearms and received 1,600 from the Crown, which made 1,800 guns for 5,000 militia,'' Bellesiles writes. ''The government set about buying and impressing every gun it could find, offering additional bounties to any volunteer who would bring his own gun. Surprisingly few people were in a position to take advantage of this offer of quick cash. In one company of 85 men, only seven showed up with their own guns. The record indicates that this figure of 8 percent was fairly typical throughout the colonies.''

This chronic shortage led to widespread confiscation and regulation of the rare firearms. Colonies had to take a gun census to know what was available. Owners were commanded to take care of their weapons. Weapons were confiscated for militia use if the owners could not use them. Bellesiles sums up: ''No gun ever belonged unqualifiedly to an individual. It could not be seized in a debt case, could not be sold if that sale left a militia member without a firearm, had to be listed in every probate inventory and returned to the state if state-owned, and could be seized whenever needed by the state for alternative purposes. Guns might be privately owned, but they were state-controlled.''

There was a gun culture in 17th-century America, but not among Europeans. Native Americans anticipated the modern cult of the gun by treating it as a magic instrument, despite the fact that they had perfected their own technology. They could fire arrows rapidly and accurately, and bows were easily maintained, repaired or replaced -- all qualities lacking in the gun of the time. Benjamin Franklin, that shrewd judge of the practical, wanted Europeans to acquire facility with the bow, as the better weapon. Spain's colonial authorities deliberately addicted Indians to the gun -- since, as Bernardo de Gálvez said, Native Americans would then ''lose their skill in handling the bow'' and would be dependent on Europeans for ball and powder. The South Carolina government adopted the same policy, reasoning that ''we shall be able to ruin them by cutting off the supply of ammunition.''

If the bow was a great weapon at distance, the tomahawk -- wielded as medieval warriors used the battle-ax, or as 18th-century soldiers did the bayonet -- was a perfect close-range weapon. Indians regularly awaited the first gun volley, then charged with tomahawk while the soldiers were trying to reload their guns, just as British troops charged with the bayonet Americans trying to reload their muskets. This made some Scots Highlanders serving in the French and Indian War adopt the tomahawk themselves. The Indians' superstition about the gun had, at this stage, some of the deleterious effects we see in the modern cult of it -- neglect of common-sense recognition of its limits and evil side effects -- though some leaders recognized the danger. The Snake tribe destroyed any guns that came their way, and the Assinoboin prohibited their use in hunting.

The Revolutionary War dispels the idea that Americans were great marksmen. How could they be, when most did not own guns and those who did had little practice? Ammunition was so hard to come by that ''wasting'' it in drill was discouraged. Even in the rare situation where a hidden American force could aim at British troops forced to flee past in narrow file, the results were not what one might expect. On the long day of irregular battle following the engagement at Concord in 1775, 3,763 American participants could hit only 273 human targets, killing 65 men. The British on that day, without the advantage of aiming at leisure from hiding, killed 50 Americans.

Bellesiles deflates the myth of the self-reliant and self-armed virtuous yeoman of the Revolutionary militias. Washington hated to see militiamen come into his camp. They destroyed camp discipline, morale and hygiene (disease often kills more than does the enemy in war). Their high desertion rate infected the regulars. To those advocating reliance on them, Washington responded: ''The Idea is chimerical, and that we have so long persisted in it is a reflection on the judgment of a Nation so enlightened as we are, as well as a strong proof of the empire of prejudice over reason.'' Militias were ill trained, undisciplined and they could not face the bayonet. (Washington's regulars had to learn from European drill instructors how to do that). At Lexington, the militia in the town square got off six or seven shots, none of which hit anyone; the British bayonet charge killed the one man who tried to stand and reload. Since Americans had no gun factories, our desperate need for alliance with France came, among other things, from the need for a source of firearms.

Guns desperately sought for military use held no charms of private ownership for the men returning from war to their farms: ''Most veterans turned their back on their guns, walking away from their encampments without their heavy muskets, even when the government offered them for sale at low rates. In the years after the war's end, these veterans, like most males, showed not the least noticeable enthusiasm for continuing military exercises in the militia, which died a slow, embarrassing death as a national institution.'' Thus, when the War of 1812 began, the dormant militias were unarmed. An 1803 census of guns carried out by the War Department found that only 23.7 percent of adult white males had access to guns, which meant that less than half of the militiamen could be armed -- in the South, only 29 percent could be.

Individual ownership of guns did not become possible, on any widespread basis, until Samuel Colt began, in the 1840's, to perfect a previously neglected firearm, the pistol. He created a revolver that could be aimed (he put a sight on it for that purpose). He hoped to replace the sword, previously the symbol of manhood in and out of the military, with a personal gun. But he had not gone into large-scale manufacture by the time the Army asked for 1,000 revolvers in the Mexican War -- he had to farm out work to competitors to fill the order. The pistols began to arrive too late to affect the outcome, but Colt -- who had initially opposed the conflict as an imperialist adventure -- subsequently claimed, in shameless advertising, that his revolvers had been the decisive factor. Actually, his pistols had no signficant military or hunting use. They were ''clearly intended for personal use in violent situations.'' The revolver began to displace the knife as the normal instrument of murder.

The invention of the Minié ball, freeing people from ramming a tight-fitting bullet home, came along in time for use in the Civil War. The combination of improved rifles and rapid reloading made the formerly dreaded bayonet charge a suicidal practice, yet Southerners held on to it -- partly from lack of guns and ammunition. The first large-scale manufacture of guns was achieved by the North, with its industrial capacity, leaving the South as hard up for arms as earlier American armies had been. This helps explain things like Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg. Bellesiles notes that ''charging is an especially attractive option for those with limited munitions; a bayonet does not need to be reloaded'' -- even though this meant that a third of the Southern Army was killed, as compared to a sixth of the Northern. The importance of the volley, as opposed to individual heroics, had returned in a new guise.

Only in the Civil War did Americans generally acquire and become familiar with guns. But even so it was not the lone gunman's revolver but the government's cavalry rifle that ''tamed'' the West, as scholars like Robert Dykstra of the State University of New York at Albany have revealed. The mythology of the gun would be elaborated and drummed into Americans, during the second half of the 19th century, by massive advertising and by popular celebration in dime novels and Wild West shows. This is a story Bellesiles has partly told in earlier articles, and one hopes he will take it up systematically in a successor volume on the gun cult -- its late rise, its false premises and promise, its devastating effects. Bellesiles has dispersed the darkness that covered the gun's early history in America. He provides overwhelming evidence that our view of the gun is as deep a superstition as any that affected Native Americans in the 17th century.

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Garry Wills is the author of ''A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government'' and ''Papal Sin.''

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