The Historian Who Couldn't Shoot Straight

Josey1

The Historian Who Couldn't Shoot Straight From the February 25, 2002 issue: The truth about Michael Bellesiles's "Arming America." by David Skinner 02/15/2002 6:00:00 PM MICHAEL BELLESILES is a professor of history at Emory University. When his "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture" appeared in 2000, it came wrapped in a yellow strip of paper printed with four blurbs--one from the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen, who called the book "a classic work of significant scholarship with inescapable policy implications." Kammen was right about the implications. Although a work of colonial and pre-Civil War history, "Arming America" spoke directly to recent debates about gun control. Arguing that no American "gun culture" existed before 1850 or so, Bellesiles marshaled a variety of sources to show that guns were much rarer, significantly less useful, and far more regulated than previously believed. He recently told a reporter he is actually a longtime gun enthusiast, but in his book's introduction he took dead aim at Charlton Heston and the NRA. And why not? If no absolute, presumptive right to own a gun existed back when the Second Amendment was written, then no such right exists today. That's why, when the book first appeared, its reviews were practically love letters. In a cover story for the New York Times Sunday book-review section, Garry Wills said "Arming America" had "dispersed the darkness" by showing that privately owned firearms in America were "barely in existence" before the Civil War. In the Los Angeles Times, University of Colorado professor Fred Anderson hailed Bellesiles's "intellectual rigor" and "thorough scholarship," calling the book a "brief against the myths that align freedom with the gun." Even the more critical reviews proclaimed "Arming America" an important, scholarly achievement. In the New York Review of Books, Edmund S. Morgan declared that Bellesiles "may have overstated his case, but only a little. He has the facts." Rutgers professor Jackson Lears wrote a 6,700-word review for the New Republic in which he took issue with the author's cultural history but assured readers Bellesiles had written a "debunking counter-narrative the old-fashioned way, by means of exhaustive research." Wesleyan University professor Richard Slotkin in the Atlantic Monthly called the book a "groundbreaking study," praising its "stringent quantitative analysis." In April 2001, Columbia University gave "Arming America" the Bancroft prize, the preeminent award for history writing. Even as the celebrations continued, however, a handful of scholars began to challenge Bellesiles's research. Questions of fact usually lost in the small-print of appendices and endnotes have been dragged into the light of day. And as a result, a much-praised book has been exposed as sloppy, inaccurate, and possibly fraudulent. Meanwhile Bellesiles's career hangs in the balance. MUCH of the controversy has been generated by small skirmishes. Take, for example, the misquotation of the Militia Act of 1792 on page 230 of "Arming America," where Bellesiles makes it seem that Congress was responsible for supplying militias with guns, instead of the members bringing their own weapons. That's not a small matter: The exact provenance of the militias' guns is a central concern in "Arming America." Caught out, Bellesiles wrote in an article in the Organization of American Historians newsletter that he'd accidentally quoted the 1803 amendment to the Militia Act. Unfortunately, the passage doesn't match up with the 1803 text either. And there's another problem: Bellesiles thanked a listserv editor named Ian Binnington for notifying him of the mistake, while Binnington says it was a man named Clayton Cramer who discovered the error. Indeed, Binnington says Bellesiles had to have known that, for he responded to Cramer's message reporting the error. It's hard to imagine that Bellesiles mistook Cramer for anyone else, since Cramer was the first critic on the scene after Bellesiles published the 1996 journal article that became the basis for "Arming America." Cramer has posted on his website a three-hundred-page refutation of Bellesiles, along with copies of historical documents. "I'm one of those weird little people who look up footnotes," says Cramer, a software engineer and a frequent contributor to Shotgun News. Cramer is a surprisingly good writer, with a master's degree in history, but, he says, "Most journals are not interested in hearing from me." Still, he has his backers. Don Hickey, a historian who peer-reviewed Bellesiles's 1996 article, remarked recently on a historians' Internet discussion group: "When I checked some of the sources that he claimed Bellesiles had misused, I concluded that Cramer was right." Another scholar adds that "if Cramer says something is in the record, it's in there. If Michael Bellesiles says something's in there, it may or may not be." So, for example, in chapter three of "Arming America," Bellesiles wrote that colonial legislatures "strictly regulated the storage of firearms, with weapons kept in some central place, to be produced only in emergencies or on muster day, or loaned to individuals living in outlying areas. They were to remain the property of the government." Jump to page 472, where you'll find a formidable endnote listing nineteen sources and forty-two citations in support. "I have only checked seventeen of the nineteen sources," says Cramer in an e-mail. Those two "might, by some miracle, match his claims. But the other seventeen aren't even close to being right." To prove his point, Cramer has posted copies of documents from eleven of the seventeen sources on his website. Connecticut, for example, appears to have supplied the militia only with gun powder and ammunition, while the members were expected to have their own guns. Much of the argument about "Arming America" concerns probate evidence. Bellesiles has expressed shock that records he discussed for only a few paragraphs would garner so much attention. But those paragraphs aren't exactly filler. The probate evidence should have taken months, if not years, and much travel for Bellesiles to gather, and none of his reviewers considered it insignificant. Garry Wills discussed Bellesiles's probate numbers before any other finding. Edmund S. Morgan wrote, "The evidence is overwhelming. First of all are probate records." And this material supplied Bellesiles's most startling empirical findings: From 1763 to 1790, only 14.7 percent of American men owned guns, and only slowly over several decades did that number rise to 32.5 percent in the late 1850s. ENTER James Lindgren, a professor of probate law at Northwestern University. Lindgren decided to look into Bellesiles's probate evidence after reading an online dispute about the book's plausibility. "I had no idea there would be errors," Lindgren says. He asked Bellesiles what data he had, so he "could formulate a reasonable request" for a sample. The "Arming America" author wrote to Lindgren that he counted guns in probate records by keeping a tally on legal pads, and that these legal pads had been compromised by a flood in his office. The revelation of Bellesiles's counting method was almost as damaging as the fact that he couldn't make his work available for replication. Making hash-marks on a legal pad, as Ohio State historian Randolph Roth softly puts it, "isn't the state of the art." Lindgren and his co-author Justin Heather proceeded to test Bellesiles's probate findings against databases compiled by other scholars and original inventories around the country. If Bellesiles's thesis of rising ownership were correct, they should have found a percentage around or even lower than 14.7. "Guns are found," Lindgren and Heather concluded after their examination, "in about 50-73 percent of the male estates in each of the seven databases." Of course, different databases use different criteria for counting, and probate records are far from comprehensive in listing property. Add to this variations in spelling, bookkeeping, and legal custom, and you can explain a generous margin of difference. But Bellesiles's national average for the years 1765 to 1790 is nowhere near the range Lindgren and Heather found. When Lindgren and Heather narrowed their focus and attempted to replicate Bellesiles's findings for Providence, Rhode Island, for the years 1679 to 1726, they found 63 percent of adult male estates listed guns, while Bellesiles found only 48 percent. Bellesiles claimed to have counted 186 adult male wills when there were only 149. "More than half of these guns are evaluated as old or of poor quality," wrote Bellesiles. Lindgren and Heather found only 9 percent so listed--and their count has since been verified by others. As went Rhode Island, so did Vermont. Reading the 312 probate records from 1770 to 1790 that Bellesiles cites, Lindgren and Heather found that there were 289 male estates, 115 of which listed guns--for an ownership rate of 40 percent. And this was a conservative count, says Randolph Roth, who confirmed the numbers on microfilm. So how did Bellesiles come up with his figure of 14.4 percent? On his university-hosted website, Bellesiles lists names and gun descriptions but does not reproduce the 312 probate inventories, so one can't actually verify his count. "He won't share his data," Roth says, not for the first time. ALTHOUGH his complaints are as devastating as anyone's, Roth has some nice things to say about the author of "Arming America." Calling him "a gifted writer," he says he still thinks highly of Bellesiles's earlier book on Ethan Allen. Indeed, Roth first became involved in the controversy when Bellesiles wrote him to ask for help in answering his critics. He wrote back, offering to go to Vermont to check probate records there and asking for a list of the records that had been consulted. Bellesiles didn't take Roth up on the offer and provided no lists. Since then, Roth has investigated and found previously unreported errors in "Arming America" concerning homicide rates. In an article for the William and Mary Quarterly--the latest issue of which is a much-touted showdown between Bellesiles and his critics--Roth notes Bellesiles's claim that "In forty-six years, Plymouth colony's courts heard five cases of assault and not a single homicide." The cited source, Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, actually covers fifty-eight years, and the endnote in "Arming America" doesn't say which forty-six years Bellesiles has in mind. Nonetheless, Roth found mention in those records of eleven murders and four suspicious deaths from 1633 to 1691. (My own examination confirmed Roth's count of eleven cases, though not all were clearly murders.) Answering Roth in the William and Mary Quarterly, Bellesiles partly acknowledges the error, but then quickly retreats to his more general argument that murder was nonetheless rare during those years. But, as Roth and others point out, "Every error in representation and reporting tends in the same direction." WORSE was yet to come. On page 353, "Arming America" reads, "During Vermont's frontier period, from 1760 to 1790, there were five reported murders (excluding those deaths in the American Revolution), and three of those were politically motivated." The endnote refers the reader to records at the county courthouse in Rutland, Vermont. But, Roth says, there are no records at the courthouse before 1778, which is when Vermont came into existence--and the court records from 1782 to 1790 have been missing for a hundred years. Gay Johnson, the clerk of the Superior Court in Rutland County, Vermont, confirmed that they lack the volumes for 1782 to 1790. Although the court does not have a complete index for all their old records, correspondence between her office and another scholar mentions that those volumes are not in the court's holdings. (She added that if anyone should know, it's Randolph Roth: "He's done more work here in the twenty-five years I've been here than anyone. . . . He's been to every inch of this building.") This is not the only time Bellesiles has named records that don't exist. One of the counties cited as a part of Bellesiles's national sample is San Francisco. In correspondence with Lindgren and on his website, Bellesiles reported that he looked at records for 1849 to 1850 and 1858 to 1859 at the San Francisco Superior Court. But the court said it has no such records; the entire archive before 1860 was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. Bellesiles later changed his story, several times actually, before claiming that he had seen those San Francisco records at the Contra Costa County Historical Society instead. But the society itself has denied this, posting on its website the fact that it has only Contra Costa probate records. MORE THAN anything else, the missing California records, discovered by Lindgren in July and reported in September simultaneously by Melissa Seckora in National Review Online and David Mehegan in the Boston Globe, threw the academic dispute about "Arming America" into high gear. Other publications picked up the story as some scholars and book reviewers began expressing doubt--including Books & Culture editor John Wilson, who recently retracted the positive review he'd written. In November, Emory University demanded a full accounting of Bellesiles. Still, others are standing by him. In December the New York Times reported that Columbia University dean Jonathan Cole had distributed "documents detailing Mr. Bellesiles's mistakes" to the Bancroft prize jurors, but spokesman James Devitt insists the university still believes it was correct to award the prize to Bellesiles. Controversy, Devitt explains, is common in scholarly debate and there is "nothing new" in this controversy. Asked who the jurors are, Devitt insists that information is "private," but that they are people who "definitely have an expertise in these areas." Wesleyan University historian Richard Slotkin says he hasn't followed the controversy, but he would still describe "Arming America" as "groundbreaking"--although he adds, "A groundbreaking study is one that opens up a subject in a way or from an angle that hasn't been done before." Jackson Lears says, "I would not have characterized his research as exhaustive," if he had the review to do over again. But then again, Lears goes on, "I was basically reviewing it as a cultural historian." Not that he doesn't think all of this is serious: "If all of these charges can be shown to be true, there may be reason to expect the Bancroft prize to reevaluate its decision." Carl Bogus, associate professor at Roger Williams University School of Law, strikes a different note. A prominent gun-control activist and one of Bellesiles's earliest defenders, Bogus faced off with Joyce Lee Malcolm in the Texas Law Review. (Malcolm was one of the first scholarly critics of "Arming America," and in her January 2001 review of the book for Reason magazine, she raised the first general warning that the book was myth-making, not myth-busting.) Bogus now sounds less combative. "The nub of the most serious charges is that he has concocted data or deliberately distorted data," Bogus says in a phone interview. "The critics," he adds, "have made a powerful prima facie case"--but "I am a lawyer, and I've seen many cases evaporate when you hear the other side." He believes however that the burden of proof is now on Bellesiles. "I consider Michael Bellesiles a friend, and maybe that's one of the reasons I'm willing to grant him a little extra time here. And I hope he prevails. But the truth will out." Bogus agrees he has a responsibility to reach a judgment on the matter. "I guess it is because I feel some responsibility as a participant in this debate and someone on Bellesiles's team." BELLESILES'S essay in the William and Mary Quarterly is not the first time he's responded to his critics. Last month, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, he referred to them as a "jihad of technical nitpickers." Around the same time, he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution the 14 percent ownership he found for the period of 1765-90 should be "more in the neighborhood of 22-24 percent," which would be a surprising and major correction to his earlier numbers, but is still well below what the existing literature suggests is likely. Many scholars seem to be reserving judgment until they've read the William and Mary Quarterly forum. Officials at Emory University have now read the forum and recently announced an investigation into Bellesiles's research. Out of the four essays on Bellesiles's book, only one is positively disposed--and then only on theoretical grounds concerning interpretation of the Second Amendment, something Bellesiles gave little attention to in "Arming America." The article by University of Colorado historian Gloria Main slams Bellesiles for his "failure to lay out his critical methods for perusal" and for ignoring her own count of guns in six counties of Maryland in 1650 to 1720. Main had concluded about 76 percent of male estates contained guns. Inexplicably, Bellesiles found 7 percent. Ira Gruber, a history professor at Rice University, picks up the argument on the militia end: "Bellesiles's treatment of the militia is much like that of guns; he regularly uses evidence in a partial or imprecise way." In his own essay, Roth concludes that "Arming America"'s claims about gun ownership are "not supported by the sources Bellesiles cites, the sources he does not cite, or by the data he presents." But without the Lindgren and Heather paper or the arguments of Clayton Cramer, the William and Mary Quarterly issue can hardly be called a point-by-point debate between Bellesiles and his critics. Several major issues go unaddressed, particularly the missing California records. Roth mentions the mythical Vermont court records, but he does not come straight out and accuse Bellesiles of fabricating a source. Even Bellesiles's response is hardly definitive. Much of it is self-dramatizing and tangential. He spends nine pages pondering the relative importance of probate records, before condescending to address a selection of criticisms. He does not volunteer explanations for apparently nonexistent sources; except for the male-female mix-up, he stands by his Rhode Island counts; he seizes on small ambiguities to explain mountain-sized differences. Basically, he is unrepentant. What may be most revealing, however, is the mood of Bellesiles's essay. He opens by quoting an old joke about the last words of a man going before the firing line: "I am honored by all this attention." And he closes with a quotation from Jacob Burckhardt: "Such indeed is the importance of the subject, that it still calls for fresh investigation, and may be studied with advantage from the most varied points of view. Meanwhile, we are content if a patient hearing be granted us." The first quotation shows evidence of self-conscious candor. The second, unfortunately, more than hints at prevarication. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/911xuovl.asp