Posted on 10/04/2001 12:12:37 PM PDT by LavaDog
NR's Melissa Seckora had the misfortune of seeing an important piece debut on National Review Online on the morning of September 11. Her story exposing the phony sources behind Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, an award-winning book critical of U.S. gun culture by Emory University historian Michael Bellesiles, normally would have attracted a great deal of attention. Instead, it became a minor concern as we all came to grips with the horror of mass terrorism.
Now there's been a stunning new development in the Bellesiles case: The head of Emory's history department is demanding that Bellesiles write a detailed defense of his book. "What is important is that he defend himself and the integrity of his scholarship immediately," said James Melton, according to yesterday's Boston Globe, which also printed a September 11 story on Bellesiles airing charges similar to NR's. "Depending upon his response, the university will respond appropriately."
That's not exactly a ringing endorsement of a colleague. And it gets worse: "If there is prima facie evidence of scholarly misconduct, the university has to conduct a thorough investigation. Whether it be a purely internal inquiry, or the university brings in distinguished scholars in the field, will depend on how Michael responds," said Melton.
Seckora, in fact, interviewed some of the "distinguished scholars" any such effort is likely to involve — including a few recommended to her by Bellesiles. Let's just say he doesn't fare well in their estimation. But how could he? Key sources for his claim that guns were a much less important part of early American culture than is commonly believed simply don't exist. Many of those he cites, in fact, were destroyed in San Francisco's 1906 earthquake. There's not a historian alive who's seen them.
Bellesiles now must explain how they wound up in his footnotes — and he told the Globe he'll do it in a future newsletter published by the Organization of American Historians.
He has his work cut out for him, thanks in part to the intrepid reporting of Seckora, whose article may be read here, or in the October 15, 2001, issue of National Review.
That is EXACTLY what I thought when I read that. Here is the original Sept 11 NRO article:
Disarming AmericaRead the Northwestern study. It slams this guys finding so hard I can't believe he even stands around with his head up.
One of the worst cases of academic irresponsibility in memory.By Melissa Seckora, NR editorial associate
October 15, 2001 issue
Originally posted September 11, 2001The power of image and myth repeatedly overwhelms reality in discussions of early American firearms," writes Michael A. Bellesiles, a professor of history at Emory University, in his book, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. "America's gun culture is an invented tradition."
Bellesiles has done some inventing of his own. His book — which won this year's Bancroft Prize, the most prestigious award in the writing of American history — is one of the worst cases of academic irresponsibility in memory. Yet his remarkable performance has not been enough to cause either his employer, Emory, or his publisher, Knopf, to act.
Some of the most significant statements in Arming America are "based" on data that simply do not exist. In other words, they are based on nothing. For example, Bellesiles claims to have counted guns in probate records of the estates of people who died in 1849 or '50 and 1858 or '59 in San Francisco. The problem is that, according to everyone who should know, all the probate records that Bellesiles allegedly reviewed were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. Rick Sherman of the California Genealogical Society has said, "I am unaware of the existence of any surviving San Francisco probate files for 1849-1859. If this involves an out-of-body experience, I'd like to know how to pull it off."
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 published an article on the subject in 1996, in the Journal of American History — a piece that won "Best Article of the Year" from the Organization of American Historians. Five months before the book came out, Anthony Ramirez of the New York Times promoted Bellesiles's thesis, presumably based on the earlier, award-winning article. He said that the probate records were the author's "principal evidence." John Chambers, a military historian from Rutgers, reviewed the book for the Washington Post, saying that the probate records were Bellesiles's "freshest and most interesting source." Edmund Morgan, one of the country's leading historians of colonial America, followed suit, exclaiming in the New York Review of Books, "The evidence is overwhelming. First of all are the probate records."
Certain historians — especially those with a strong quantitative bent — were skeptical of Bellesiles's data, but many others, including Garry Wills, uncritically embraced Arming America, most likely because it appeared to confirm what they have long wanted to believe: that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right to bear arms, that individual gun rights were deemed unimportant at the time of the writing and ratification of the Constitution.
One of those who were skeptical was Joyce Malcolm, a history professor at Bentley College who has written a book on the Anglo-American conception of gun rights. She says, "Bellesiles fails to provide even basic information about the probate figures that form the basis of his claims for the rarity of guns. And he repeatedly makes general statements that are extreme. But if you check his footnotes, a more disturbing pattern emerges. It is not just an odd mistake or a difference of interpretation, but misrepresentation of what his sources [if they exist] actually say, time after time after time."
In documents on his website, and in correspondence with other scholars, Bellesiles has not only reasserted that he used records in San Francisco, he has embellished his story by giving a location: the Superior Court. In a long interview I conducted with him, he confirmed more than once that the archives he used were at the Superior Court, and said further that he had read hundreds of probate records in both San Francisco and Los Angeles. "There were only a few hundred cases, but that's a lot of cases."
When I asked him point-blank whether he had used probate records from San Francisco County, he answered: "I used county probate records from the Superior Court. I had to go the courthouse — the San Francisco Superior Court." But the deputy clerk of the court, Clark Banayad, says flatly, "Every record at the San Francisco Superior Court predating 1906 was destroyed by fire, or other causes, in the 1906 earthquake." This is common knowledge among California probate and genealogical authorities. The probate records cannot be found at the History Center of the San Francisco Public Library either. Librarian Susan Goldstein says that the center stores some archives of the city and the county, including property deeds, general indexes, and contracts, but that it has "no record of the number of guns owned in the city of San Francisco prior to the 1906 earthquake." Kathy Beals, author of three books on San Francisco's early probate records, says that "to my knowledge, there are no official probate files in existence for years prior to 1880, and only scraps from 1880 until 1905."
I then informed 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."
Bellesiles appears to have been in error yet again. According to Martha Whittaker, a reference librarian at San Francisco's Sutro Library, the records do not exist. "All official probate records were destroyed by the San Francisco earthquake and fire because the city hall burned down." As for the Family Research Library, Elaine Hasleton, supervisor of public affairs, says that the library has an index of all estates in probate in the city and county of San Francisco from 1850, but that the index does not list information about gun ownership. "The index only lists names and the locations of the actual probate records. It does not list possessions."
Curiouser and Curiouser
The San Francisco Superior Court, the Sutro Library, and the Mormon Church's Family Research Library are not the only places that do not have an archive that Bellesiles purports to have used. In correspondence last year, Bellesiles assured would-be replicators of his research that for all but "several" of the 40 counties he examined, he did his probate research via microfilm at the Federal Archives in East Point, Ga. He wrote: "The probate records are all on microfilm in the National Archives. I went to the East Point, Georgia, federal center to read these microfilms." When it turned out that the archives in East Point did not have these materials, Bellesiles admitted that he might have been mistaken. His new story was that he went around the country doing most of his probate research in over 30 different county or state archives looking at original records, not microfilm of the original records, as he had first claimed. One wonders how he could have forgotten whether he did his research in a single library near his office or in more than 30 archives around the country.It could have something to do with the fact that his "database" consisted merely of tick marks on pads of paper. "For the research in the book," he said in our interview, "I was going through sample years, counting numbers of inventories and checking off how many had guns with cross hatches. It was very rough reading of very difficult documents." Bellesiles claims to have counted 11,170 probate inventories; his was, at a minimum, a rather unorthodox and not very modern system for recording great amounts of historical information. What's more, Bellesiles says that all of his tick-mark notes got wet in a flood in his office and had to be discarded, leaving him with no documentation at all to back up his probate study. "All of my notes were destroyed in boxes on the floor of my office, and they got drenched, pulped."
James Lindgren, a Northwestern University law professor, criminologist, and probate expert, trained in quantitative methods, and his coauthor, attorney Justin Heather, have identified many other errors in Bellesiles's work in their paper "Counting Guns in Early America." They found that Bellesiles purported to examine about a hundred 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.
Lindgren and Heather have also determined that Bellesiles's main 18th-century probate contentions are mathematically impossible. In his book, Bellesiles reports a national mean for the period 1765-90 of 14.7 percent of probate inventories listing a gun, when every other published probate researcher — including Anna Hawley, Gloria Main, Alice Hanson Jones, and Harold Gill — has found three to five times that many. "It's a simple sixth-grade math problem, computing an overall mean from samples," says Lindgren. He and his coauthor elaborate on this at length in their paper. Oddly, Bellesiles has never disputed any of the pair's main charges. The closest he has come so far to admitting any wrongdoing was in a letter he sent to the Wall Street Journal (which had reported critically on his case): "I have come to feel that the use of my sample sets is not as statistically sound as I would like."
Other scholars who have looked into the matter concur that Bellesiles's allegations are false. Lindgren "utterly devastates Bellesiles's research," says Albert Alschuler, a law professor at the University of Chicago and author of a recent biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Randolph Roth of Ohio State University, the leading expert on early-America homicide rates, has looked at Lindgren and Heather's counts of guns in the Providence inventories and found them correct. A third scholar, UCLA's Eric Monkkonen, one of the country's foremost quantitative historians, says, "Lindgren's data show that Bellesiles was not correct."
Despite all this, the book's editor, Jane Garrett, still defends the book. Knopf declined to answer questions, but in a written statement Garrett said, "Hosts of reputable scholars continue to defend [Bellesiles's] methods and his conclusions. Controversies of this nature are not uncommon in the historical profession. That's what makes history so interesting."
Yet it is not so "interesting" as that. Bellesiles suggested that I speak to ten professors who knew his work, of whom I was able to speak to six. All were either negative about his work — though stopping short of accusing him of outright fraud — or cautious in their praise. And almost none of those who continue to support Bellesiles has bothered to explore the criticism of him. None could identify a single criticism as false. In fact, when I asked Bellesiles himself to point out such a criticism, he could only identify a few criticisms that, on examination, proved true. In general, my investigation of this case did not support the impression of some — such as Knopf's Garrett — that there are distinguished scholars on both sides who have carefully gone over the challenged evidence. Those who have taken the trouble have Bellesiles dead-to-rights.
Saul Cornell of Ohio State is one of the historians whom Bellesiles suggested I contact. He has looked into criticism of the author, but could not identify any particular errors in it. Cornell says that some of the criticism has been "hysterical [and] ideologically driven," while other criticism — such as Lindgren and Heather's — has been "thought-provoking [and] powerful": "We are all waiting to see what Michael's response to it will be. Even if he is proven wrong, it is possible to write an important book that moves the debate forward, even if it is flawed. We are all in Bellesiles's debt for opening the debate."
Yet Stanford's Jack Rakove, winner of a 1997 Pulitzer Prize in history, takes a much different view. A historian's claims, he says, ought to be verifiable: "Other scholars should be able to go to the archives to see whether you've quoted them accurately and used them correctly. Bellesiles will have to defend himself. If he can't do it, we will know. If he has really screwed up, he will be held accountable."
Randolph Roth, who has also found several major problems with Bellesiles's homicide counts (which he will discuss in a forthcoming article in the William & Mary Quarterly as part of a forum on Arming America), agrees: "If I am wrong, I want you to be able to fix my mistakes. The only way that can happen, however, is if I share my data and make clear exactly what sources I looked at. Michael hasn't done that yet. That is the big problem."
Those who have examined Arming America have documented hundreds of possibly intentional misconstructions of sources or outright falsehoods. The probate records aside, Bellesiles has egregious problems in the areas of homicide data, gun censuses, reports on militia arms, hunting accounts, travel accounts, the opinions of the anti-Federalists, and laws governing guns. So far it appears that Bellesiles has not been able to validate any of the challenged portions of his book. Indeed, in a new paperback edition of Arming America being released this fall, he has quietly capitulated on some of the critics' claims, retracting or altering the challenged statements about probate data from Providence.
A Career Sails On
Bellesiles told me he plans on spending the next ten years or so reconstructing the information he lost in the flood and posting it on his website. "That is what I am working on now — it is my hobby," he says.Meanwhile, his university position seems secure, and he continues to win academic plums. Walter Adamson, outgoing chairman of the Emory history department, told me, "Nothing has come forward to me that indicates that Bellesiles deserves to be treated or included in that company of people who have been judged to fabricate their sources." He said this, however, before the revelation of Bellesiles's San Francisco inventions.
And what about Knopf? Says one scholar, "What has happened to ethics [there]? They have allowed a rogue author and an editor of apparently compromised judgment to go forward unchecked. If Knopf doesn't know that it is publishing false data, it is only because it chooses not to know. The very image of Knopf as a serious publishing house has been compromised."
One could only imagine the outcry if a conservative scholar, fabricating evidence to prove a pet conservative point, had been found to be careless (to say the least). If the purpose of historical scholarship is to construct a past that is congenial to oneown biases, then Michael A. Bellesiles can be judged a success. But that is not, of course, the purpose of historical scholarship. Those who understand that can take heart: Arming America has been disarmed by its own dishonesty.
Oh my God. This is absolutely heinous. Probate records could be a good source of inventory information, but not for guns. Most likely upon a death the guns would go immediately to a family member or trusted friend and never end up in a court disposition. This guy was goosing everyone from the start.
If you read about pioneer life in Ohio and elsewhere, they clearly say every cabin had one or more guns that were used primarily for hunting but also for defense. To say they weren't armed is nonsense.
There are ALL kinds of stuff this guy made up. Let me find two links and I'll post them. One is from the Northwestern study which rips his probate research, not only as dishonest, but when probate records are found, they find he can't count.
madison46
He should examine some old ledgers from country stores. They will show lots of guns and ammo being sold.
Click the link to the left "Guns in early America". You'll need Acrobat Reader.
ROTFLMAO. The time for that was about 40 years ago. I think its high time that the American people wake up to the fact that government grant driven junk science and politically correct social theory are the cancerous norms that have infected universities. If people receive any supposed 'scholarship' that emanates from American academia with a jaundiced eye and a load of skepticism, they will be right far more often than wrong.
All sarcasm aside, don't you just love it when Marxists are exposed as the liars and hypocrites they are. At lease in the the world of our political debate, the ends should not justify the means.
In war, I might have a different opinion. LET'S ROLL!!!!!
In the early Republic, Bellesiles does admit that some guns were manufactured in the United States, mostly at government arsenals, but downplays the number of both makers and guns made. But before we get to the question of how effective private gun manufacturers were (either under federal contract or for the private sector), we have to confront yet another example of intentional fraud, and this is a most egregious case. Bellesiles discusses the Militia Act of 1792, and how it obligated every able-bodied free white male between 18 and 45 to enroll in the militia:
Further, "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. Congress took upon itself the responsibility of providing those guns, and specified that within five years all muskets "shall be of bores sufficient for balls of the eighteenth part of a pound."He cites this as U.S. Statutes 1:271-74. But that isn’t what the Militia Act of 1792 says. The actual text is:
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....23 [missing text emphasized]Not only does he leave out the words “provide himself” that demonstrate that Congress did not take “upon itself the responsibility of providing those guns,” but he added the words “constantly provided” to cover that he had changed the tense of the verb.When confronted with this very dramatic error, Bellesiles first denied that there was any error at all, but eventually, as the weight of evidence accumulated, he admitted that the text was incorrect, and explained his error as:
It took me a while to find my original source at a library in South Carolina, but the phrase "shall...be constantly provided with" is in the 1792 militia act. But you are right that it is not in any version I could find from the 1790s. So I then went carefully through the legislative records and found an 1803 Amendment to the 1792 Act ("An Act in addition to an Act entitled 'An Act More effectually to provide for the National Defence.'") Checking further, I found it as US Statutes II: 207, passed March 2, 1803. So I was at fault in not reconciling the 1815 version I used with the 1792 version I also read (I assumed that they were just different versions of the same act).24In spite of explicitly listing his source for the quotation as US Statutes 1:271-74, as well as providing the corresponding citations in Annals of Congress that match that text, he actually quoted a later document with what Bellesiles says was the 1803 Militia Act.
There is an 1803 Militia Act that says, “That every citizen duly enrolled in the militia, shall be constantly provided with arms, accoutrements, and ammunition…”25 But this doesn’t match Bellesiles’s “quote” either; Bellesiles doesn’t cite the 1803 Militia Act; and even that statute doesn’t specify that Congress is to supply the arms; it seems to leave it a bit open as He cites this as U.S. Statutes 1:271-74. But that isn’t what the Militia Act of 1792 says.
The actual text is:
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....23 [missing text emphasized]Not only does he leave out the words “provide himself” that demonstrate that Congress did not take “upon itself the responsibility of providing those guns,” but he added the words “constantly provided” to cover that he had changed the tense of the verb.
When confronted with this very dramatic error, Bellesiles first denied that there was any error at all, but eventually, as the weight of evidence accumulated, he admitted that the text was incorrect, and explained his error as:
It took me a while to find my original source at a library in South Carolina, but the phrase "shall...be constantly provided with" is in the 1792 militia act. But you are right that it is not in any version I could find from the 1790s. So I then went carefully through the legislative records and found an 1803 Amendment to the 1792 Act ("An Act in addition to an Act entitled 'An Act More effectually to provide for the National Defence.'") Checking further, I found it as US Statutes II: 207, passed March 2, 1803. So I was at fault in not reconciling the 1815 version I used with the 1792 version I also read (I assumed that they were just different versions of the same act).24In spite of explicitly listing his source for the quotation as US Statutes 1:271-74, as well as providing the corresponding citations in Annals of Congress that match that text, he actually quoted a later document with what Bellesiles says was the 1803 Militia Act. There is an 1803 Militia Act that says, “That every citizen duly enrolled in the militia, shall be constantly provided with arms, accoutrements, and ammunition…”25 But this doesn’t match Bellesiles’s “quote” either; Bellesiles doesn’t cite the 1803 Militia Act; and even that statute doesn’t specify that Congress is to supply the arms; it seems to leave it a bit open as to who is obligated to keep the militiamen supplied. Indeed, prosecutions of militiamen for failure to “be constantly provided” under the 1803 Militia Act are very clear on two points: the 1803 Militia Act was in addition to the 1792 Militia Act, and the individual militiaman was still obligated to provide himself with these arms and accoutrements.26
Even worse, the context in which Bellesiles misquotes the Militia Act of 1792 is specific to the situation of the militia’s state of arms in the 1790s. Even if the quotation were from the 1803 Militia Act, the following paragraphs are now chronologically incorrect, seeking to explain actions of 1792 and 1794 based on a law not yet written.
Also interesting are Bellesiles’s claims about the inability of private gun manufacturers to build to government contracts, and how differently less ideological historians report the same facts. After reporting that Congress decided to supply all the arms of the militia, “Congress ordered the purchase of seven thousand muskets. Over the next two years, the government was able to purchase only 480 ‘rifle guns.’”27
M. L. Brown gives a very different description of the 1792 contract: In 1792 Congress, further alarmed by increasing British and Spanish activity along the vast frontier, raised a battalion of riflemen consisting of four companies each comprised of 82 privates which were to be armed with the American rifle…. The contract rifles…were purchased from Pennsylvania riflesmiths between September 12, 1792, and May 5, 1793, at an average cost of $10.00 per stand….28
A total of 436 rifles were produced and delivered in less than nine months 29 to arm 328 soldiers. The limitation was not that private industry could not supply enough rifles, as Bellesiles’s use of “only” seems to imply, but that the government was only buying enough rifles for four companies of riflemen.
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