|
 t
is "the duty of any scholar to take responsibility for errors
and to endeavor to correct them," Michael A. Bellesiles writes
in the latest newsletter of the
Organization of American Historians. Yet the award-winning author
of Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture,
and professor of history at Emory University, does no such thing
in an article that is meant as a reply to his critics.
Bellesiles
does not correct any of the serious, carefully documented
criticisms of scholars who have taken the time to review his sources.
"His errors in using sources are dramatic and go to the heart
of his book's argument — how many guns there were, who owned
them, where they were kept, what condition they were in, how they
were used, and how important they were in early America," says
James Lindgren, a Northwestern University law professor who has
identified many errors in Bellesiles's work.
Arming America
— winner of this year's Bancroft Prize, the most prestigious
award in the writing of American history — represents one of
the worst cases of academic irresponsibility in memory. The thesis
Bellesiles sets out to prove is that there were very few guns in
early America, let alone a gun culture, and that most of the guns
that did exist were old and broken. He first published his thesis
in 1996 in an article in the Journal of American History (JAH) —
a piece that won "Best Article of the Year" from the Organization
of American Historians (OAH). Even before his book was published,
Bellesiles received praise from the likes of John Chambers, Edmund
Morgan, and Gary Wills. But there were also academics who were skeptical
of his work, academics who said that in order for Bellesiles to
prove his thesis, he had to alter the historical record by mischaracterizing
and misinterpreting his sources.
Criticisms
recently aired in National Review (see "
Disarming America" ), the Boston Globe, Reviews
in American History, and in faculty workshops at Columbia, Yale,
and other major universities, were so grave (and so well supported)
that Emory University felt compelled to order Bellesiles to provide
a "detailed, point-by-point" response. It now appears
that Bellesiles's response has prompted initially supportive academics
to take a second look at his work.
Don Hickey,
a professor of history at Wayne State College, who peer reviewed
Bellesiles's earlier work, recently said, "These criticisms
have convinced me that Bellesiles misread, misused, and perhaps
even fabricated some of his evidence. I no longer believe that his
evidence proves his thesis (though it is still possible that the
thesis is at least partly correct). Had it not been for the work
of an independent scholar as well as the popular press, I might
not have reached this conclusion."
Faculty at
Emory University are following the story more closely now, too.
"Bellesiles's response is utterly unresponsive," one Emory
University professor told me. "A number of [us at Emory] think
the questions that have been raised by critics whose motivations
are not in any way political, are exceptionally serious." Serious
enough that the dean of Emory College, Robert A. Paul, seemed to
reserve judgement when he said, "I commend Michael for beginning
this process of engaging his critics in his article.…This is
the first step in a long process as we see it; a process of careful
and thoughtful scholarly debate. There will be other steps…that
will inform any further action or decision we will make."
Some of the
most significant statements in Arming America are "based"
on data that do not exist. That is, documents Bellesiles told me
he reviewed at the San Francisco Superior Court were actually destroyed
by fire in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. When I told Professor
Bellesiles that the probate records could not be found at the San
Francisco Superior Court, he changed his story: "Did I say
San Francisco Superior Court? I can't remember exactly. I'm working
off a dim memory. Now, if I remember correctly, the Mormon Church's
Family Research Library has these records. You can try the Sutro
Library, too."
But the records
do not exist at the Sutro Library; nor does the Mormon Church's
Family Research Library have an archive that Bellesiles purports
to have used. The library's supervisor of public affairs has said
that the library has an index of all estates in probate in the city
and county of San Francisco from 1850, but the index does not
list information about gun ownership. In fact, anyone who knows
anything about probate records from San Francisco County agrees
that the records do not exist.
So far, Bellesiles
has not responded to National Review's critical report, but
in response to a Boston Globe story that was also critical
of his use of probate records in San Francisco, Bellesiles told
The Chronicle of Higher Education, "I have located the
documents…I've even sent for them myself."
Oddly, however,
Bellesiles does not mention in the OAH response to the critics that
he has located the probate records in question. Instead, he changes
his story again in an apparent attempt to admit some error. "I
completely forget in which of several California archives I read
what I recall to be twelve probate records from 1859 and 1860 with
San Francisco as the stated location." This conflicts with
what he told me in September — that he looked at "a few
hundred cases" in both San Francisco and Los Angeles. Mysteriously,
he adds the year 1860, which is not in the sample in his book.
Bellesiles
used a similar tactic of ever-shifting stories with regard to probate
records from around the country allegedly stored on microfilm at
the federal archives in East Point, Ga. He originally maintained
that he had done most of his probate research for his book using
microfilm at those archives. When it turned out he could not support
this claim — because the East Point archives simply have no
state probate records — he admitted he might have been mistaken.
Instead, he said he traveled around the country looking at all the
records in 30 different county or state archives.
Besides the
question of the San Francisco probate records, Bellesiles was also
nonresponsive to serious errors pointed out by Northwestern's James
Lindgren, Robert Churchill, a lecturer at Princeton University,
Ohio State's Randolph Roth, the leading expert on early-American
homicide rates, and Clayton Cramer, an independent historian who
has found hundreds of errors in Arming America. Even when
Bellesiles comes close to giving some sort of explanation for his
inaccurate gun counts, he manages to give responses that are directly
contrary to ones he has given before, and are still wrong.
Lindgren and
his coauthor, attorney Justin Heather, have identified many errors
in Bellesiles's work in their paper "Counting Guns in Early
America," which will appear next spring in The William and
Mary Law Review. They found that Bellesiles purported to have
examined about 100 wills in Providence, R.I., that simply do not
exist, and that he also misused records that do exist: repeatedly
counting women as men, counting as old or broken guns that were
not so listed, and claiming that there were a "great many"
state-owned weapons when there was only one. The pair also found
that some of his data are mathematically impossible.
Lindgren and
Heather's detailed statistical analysis of probate records in early
America includes an analysis of another set of records compiled
by Alice Hanson Jones. Bellesiles wrote that he had used this compilation
when he first published his probate data in 1996 in his JAH article.
"Integrating Alice Hanson Jones's valuable probate compilation
into this general study and examining counties in sample periods
during the eighty-five years from 1765 to 1850 reveals a startling
distribution of guns in early America," he wrote. In 2000 in
Arming America, Bellesiles republished the same data down
to the decimal point.
But after two
teams of replicators found that Jones's data did not match Bellesiles's
account of it, he changed his story. He claimed that he never used
Jones's sample, despite writing that he had in 1996. "Six years
after Bellesiles published his findings, those of us engaged in
the professional responsibility of evaluating his work are still
guessing at the composition of his sample," writes Robert Churchill,
a historian at Princeton.
Lindgren and
Heather also found that material on Bellesiles's website misrepresented
the content of some Vermont probate records in the same manner he
misrepresented the Providence records. Lindgren and Heather's finding:
The records reported on Bellesiles's website concerning the condition
of guns in Vermont were substantially altered from the originals
as they appear in Vermont. Globe reporter David Mehegan actually
went to Vermont to check out these inventories, and confirmed the
accuracy of Lindgren and Heather's finding. Bellesiles had systematically
changed the condition of guns to make them appear old or broken.
According to
an article in The Chronicle, Bellesiles learned of these
errors only after talking to the Globe, and believes that
someone hacked this portion of his website. Bellesiles "now
seeks to avoid responsibility for these errors by claiming that
he originally posted to his website a PDF file that showed guns
in Vermont to be in far better condition than he had previously
claimed in Arming America — thereby undercutting
his book — though he said at the time that the website data
would confirm his previous findings," writes Randy Barnett,
a Boston University law professor, in a letter to The Chronicle.
"Unless and until Professor Bellesiles produces the original
data on Vermont guns that he says he first posted on the Web, and
makes them available for examination to interested researchers,
we are entitled to be skeptical of this latest story." (The
Chronicle chose not to publish Barnett's reference to the absurdity
of Bellesiles's hacking claim.)
In his OAH
newsletter response Bellesiles entirely mischaracterizes the examples
in Mehegan's article, giving the impression that his differences
with the Globe were over trivialities rather than his having
changed the condition of guns to fit his argument in Arming America.
Several scholars
(including at least one of his supporters) have requested access
to Bellesiles's "unhacked" files — files that Bellesiles
also promised to put up on his website but has not. Scholars have
also suggested that these files be posted and disseminated through
a listserv for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History
and Culture edited by John Saillant of Western Michigan University.
"Michael Bellesiles is obliged by scholarly conventions to
share his data. He has already accomplished part of that obligation
with his footnotes to written sources that anybody can consult,"
says Saillant. "He has not yet shared the data that he drew
from consulting a number of probate records; he has only published
the conclusions."
Emory University
is currently conducting a thorough investigation of allegations
of hacking. In a written statement, Jan Gleason, assistant vice
president for university communications said, "To date, we
have been unable to confirm any hacking, but the investigation is
ongoing." Neither the university nor Bellesiles himself has
been able to support Bellesiles's claims of hacking, which many
now believe to be a hoax.
Others besides
Lindgren and Heather have discovered major problems with Bellesiles's
work. In a review of Arming America in the current issue
of Reviews in American History, Robert Churchill finds in
his own research of late 18th and early 19th-century militia returns
that Bellesiles "mischaracterized, misinterpreted, and sometimes
grossly misinterpreted" the language of original records in
order to advance his thesis of gun scarcity. He offers several examples
of both in his devastating review, as well as in a September 19
online posting for the H-Law online discussion group.
For example,
Bellesiles makes up a story in which Benedict Arnold discovers upon
hearing the news of Lexington and Concord that his men were unarmed.
Bellesiles cited in Arming America Harold Selesky's War
and Society in Colonial Connecticut but gets the anecdote wrong.
The way Bellesiles told the story, Arnold "inspected his troops
and found them largely unarmed. He threatened to break into the
town arsenal in order to arm his men, but the town's selectmen relented
and opened the doors to his militia, with Arnold supervising the
distribution of Brown Besses." But Churchill notes that in
Selesky's account and in the source Selesky cited, Arnold demanded
the keys to the powderhouse, so as to secure ammunition for
his men. "The compelling details of gunlessness and the distribution
of public arms appear to be an invention designed to advance the
thesis [in Arming America]," writes Churchill.
Ohio State's
Randolph Roth, meanwhile, has found several major problems with
Bellesiles's homicide counts, which he will discuss in a forthcoming
article in The William and Mary Quarterly as part of a forum
on Arming America. Bellesiles claimed, for example, that
in 46 years in 17th-century Plymouth Colony there were no prosecutions
for homicide. Yet, the standard records he cites contain many prosecutions
for homicide. Bellesiles's error rate for finding homicides in Plymouth
is 100 percent. In Arming America, Bellesiles also wrote
that "Whites rarely assaulted other whites in the colonies
and almost never killed one another," a claim that he repeats
for the antebellum period, when he says murder was "rare."
According to Roth, Arming America gets this point wrong because
it "misreads its sources." Roth's research shows that
"at certain times and in certain places, whites killed one
another at terribly high rates before the 1850s. New England's colonists
had a high homicide rate before King Phillip's War in 1675-6, and
Virginia's colonists had a high homicide rate before the French
and Indian War."
All of the
many scholars I have talked to are either critical about Bellesiles's
work — without always accusing him of outright fraud —
or cautious in their praise. Almost none of those who continue to
support Bellesiles have bothered to explore the criticism of him.
Not one could name a single error that any critics had made. In
fact, several scholars who have taken time to check the hundreds
of errors found by Clayton Cramer have found that Cramer was right.
One such error
Cramer discovered is in Bellesiles's use of a quote from the Militia
Act of 1792, which Bellesiles appears to have distorted to suggest
that militia members would have to be provided arms and ammunition
by the government. In the OAH newsletter, Bellesiles writes that
"In discussing the Militia Act of 1792, I quote the 1803 amendment
to this act that 'every citizen so enrolled, shall be constantly
provided with arms, accoutrements, and ammunition.' The quotation
and its citation are both correct. The error is in the context."
But that's not what he wrote in his original edition of Arming
America. What he quoted then was that "'every citizen so
enrolled, shall…be constantly provided with a good musket or
firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints,' and
other accoutrements."
The actual
Militia Act of 1792 reads "that every citizen so enrolled and
notified, shall within six months thereafter, provide himself
with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two
spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch with a box therein to contain
not less than twenty-four cartridges, suited to the bore of his
musket or firelock: or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch and
powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a
quarter of a pound of powder [emphasis added] …." Not
only does Bellesiles quote himself inaccurately, he says he cited
the 1803 statute, when he didn't, and conflates the Militia Act
of 1792 and the Militia Act of 1803. In other words, just as with
the Boston Globe criticisms, Bellesiles cannot respond to
what he actually did, so he creates a new reality and responds to
that.
Instead of
responding in a careful way to the criticism from fellow academics,
Michael Bellesiles has produced a response that is as inadequate
and inaccurate as his book. "He has not been able to support
a single one of the many portions of Arming America that
have been challenged by academics, nor has he yet documented a single
error in any of his academic critics' claims about his work,"
says Lindgren. Bellesiles refers to criticisms that are either invented
or not part of the public debate. "Told that I do not discuss
Daniel Morgan and his rifleman," he writes, "I can only
point to the six pages where I do so; charged with calling for the
confiscation of firearms, I can only ask for the page reference."
There is just one problem with this: No scholar or journalist has
ever heard these criticisms before.
|
