Guns and Poses

Josey1

Guns and Poses Michael Bellesiles's work is charming and disarming--but sloppy and maybe fraudulent. BY KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL Friday, February 22, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST Word has finally come that Emory University is going to investigate Michael Bellesiles, the award-winning author of "Arming America."It was about 18 months ago that Mr. Bellesiles published one of those rare books that purport to turn both history and modern politics upside-down. In "Arming America" he claimed that very few early Americans had actually owned guns, opening a debate over whether the Second Amendment had been designed to protect individual gun rights.Mr. Bellesiles originally received lavish praise from left-leaning reviewers and historians and was even given the prestigious Bancroft Prize. But since then, "Arming America" has spiraled into an enormous academic scandal, with scholars from every quarter claiming his work is at best sloppy, at worst falsified. Emory will undoubtedly be investigating specific claims about Mr. Bellesiles's research. In truth, all the university needs to do is look back at the past 18 months of the author's shifting stories, and his disregard for academic methods, to realize he doesn't meet the standards of the scholarly profession. The controversy over Mr. Bellesiles's book has centered on probate records that list the contents of estates when people die. In "Arming America," Mr. Bellesiles said he looked at more than 11,000 such records from early America, and that the results showed a low number of Americans owned functional guns. "Arming America" came out in September 2000. About that time, James Lindgren, a professor of law at Northwestern, wanted to reanalyze Mr. Bellesiles's probate information for his own research. He sent Mr. Bellesiles a routine e-mail in August 2000 asking the Emory historian for details about which records he had used and where to find them. Mr. Bellesiles wrote back that he'd read them on microfilm in the federal archives in East Point, Ga. But when Mr. Lindgren and others made calls, they were told the facility had no such records.Mr. Bellesiles then sent an e-mail saying he'd read them in some 30 different places across the country. He also told Mr. Lindgren he couldn't immediately send detailed information on which records he'd used because his counts-made on legal pads-had been damaged by a flood. Unable to get specific answers, Mr. Lindgren proceeded on the basis of information Mr. Bellesiles had already published. The first dispute came over a set of probate records for Providence, R.I. In his book, Mr. Bellesiles had cited the published "Early Records of the Town of Providence." When Mr. Lindgren and his co-author Justin Heather examined those records, they found Mr. Bellesiles had undercounted the percentage of guns and incorrectly reported many as old or broken. Mr. Lindgren e-mailed Mr. Bellesiles and asked him to check his data. The Emory professor responded that it wasn't a "top priority." In a public radio exchange in January 2001, Mr. Bellesiles said the counts differed because (contrary to his book) he had not used published records, though his Web site now says he did. The next controversy came over probate records for Vermont. Mr. Bellesiles had promised to start putting information of the probate records on his Web site; the first posting included details about Vermont. Mr. Heather went to Vermont and re-counted; he found that 40% of estates had guns, whereas Mr. Bellesiles said that less than 15% did. A separate scholar has since confirmed the accuracy of the Lindgren-Heather work. Meanwhile, a reporter for the Boston Globe went to Vermont to count the records, and in a story in September 2001 confirmed that Mr. Bellesiles's Web site report had serious errors. Mr. Bellesiles said that somebody had hacked into his Web site and changed his data. Scholars scratched their heads. The Vermont data Mr. Bellesiles said were hacked had also backed up his book. What he was suggesting was that he'd originally put up information on his Web site that contradicted his book, and that a hacker had altered it so that it supported "Arming America."Before this scandal had died down, another one surfaced. Mr. Bellesiles had said he'd read probate records at the San Francisco Superior Court. Scholars were confused; it was common knowledge the records had been destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. The Superior Court confirmed there were no records. Mr. Bellesiles then suggested two other places he might have found them, but they weren't there either. Finally, Mr. Bellesiles said he'd found them at the Contra Costa County Historical Society. The Contra Costa facility not only said that it didn't have those San Francisco probate records, but said it had gone back through all its logs and didn't have any records of Mr. Bellesiles ever having visited its collection until recently.Meanwhile, new problems keep cropping up. Mr. Bellesiles had long claimed the probate records were only a small piece of his work, and that scholars should look at the bigger picture. They have, and the results aren't pretty. In the most recent edition of the William and Mary Quarterly, four historians review his work. Randolph Roth, a history professor at Ohio State, focuses on Mr. Bellesiles's use of homicide information, and finds that every instance Mr. Bellesiles cites is "misleading or wrong." Rice University's Ira Gruber looks at Mr. Bellesiles's military history and concludes his efforts "founder on a consistently biased reading of sources and on careless uses of evidence and context." Gloria Main, an associate professor at the University of Colorado, says Mr. Bellesiles ignored studies that ran contrary to his conclusion. Emory had let it be known that it expected Mr. Bellesiles to answer the charges. In November, Mr. Bellesiles published an article in the newsletter of the Organization of American Historians, but instead of going through point by point, he devoted most of the piece to complaints that he'd been unfairly attacked. Mr. Bellesiles also has a piece in the William and Mary Quarterly; it too falls short of answering the questions.Emory is now conducting its own investigation. There's an easy way out for Mr. Bellesiles: He simply needs to turn over a list of what probate records he used. Any scholar worth his salt should have that basic information at hand. But maybe that is the problem. Ms. Strassel is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays. http://opinionjournal.com/columnists/kstrassel/?id=105001670