Disarming America, Part II
Why won’t Michael Bellesiles seriously respond to his critics?
By Melissa Seckora, NR editorial associate
November 26, 2001 8:35 a.m.
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.