What Clayton Cramer Saw and (Nearly) Everyone Else Missed [Bellesiles]

History News Network ^ | 1-6-03 | Clayton Cramer

[beckett]

What Clayton Cramer Saw and (Nearly) Everyone Else Missed
By Clayton E. Cramer
Mr. Cramer is a software engineer and historian. His last book was Concealed Weapon Laws of the Early Republic: Dueling, Southern Violence, and Moral Reform (Praeger Press, 1999). His web site is http://www.claytoncramer.com.

Michael A. Bellesiles’s Bancroft Prize for Arming America has been revoked—the first time that a Bancroft Prize has ever been taken away from an author.[1] He has also resigned from Emory University after a blistering criticism by a blue-ribbon panel.[2] Is this embarrassing moment for the history profession a fluke, or indicative of deeper problems?

I fear that it isn’t a fluke. Arming America reveals that there are some very serious problems in the history professorate, and they are not confined to just one history professor’s demonstration of hubris. Before I launch into a discussion of these problems, let me tell you why I am writing this article.

My Involvement With the Bellesiles Scandal

I have been described in some articles covering this scandal as Michael Bellesiles’s most persistent critic, and I suppose that this is a fair statement. Bellesiles first presented his rather astonishing claims about gun scarcity in early America in a 1996 Journal of American History paper. At the time, I was a history graduate student, working on my MA thesis at Sonoma State University in California. My thesis examined the development of concealed weapon laws in the early Republic, and what I found completely contradicted Bellesiles’s claim that the early Republic had few guns, and few hunters.

[Cicero]

Nice article. Frankly, I don't believe for a minute that Belisles was awarded the Bancroft Prize because the prize review committee didn't think to question his citations, or that the Newberry Library Committee awarded him a second NEH grant because they didn't think to question him either.

At the time the two committee reviews were taking place, Bellisles's scholarly integrity was ALREADY being publicly and vociferously questioned. The readers for the journals and the book publisher didn't have that advantage, but they should have known, too, and probably they did know. They just didn't want to know, as the saying goes.

The truth is, dedicated liberals are perfectly willing to lie or to cover up lies in what they consider to be a good political cause. We have seen it repeatedly in the news media. I am aware of similar shoddy and lying scholarship in my own scholarly field. Many colleagues of the writers are perfectly aware that these books are plain lies, but they prefer to sweep that inconvenient fact under the rug because the scholar in question has the right (i.e. left) political views.

So, maybe it's only polite to give these people the benefit of the doubt when they say, "Oh, we didn't have time to verify quotations. We naturally trusted the author to tell the truth." But in point of fact they are probably lying too. People like Eric Foner, responsible for steering the Bancroft Prize to Bellisles, don't hesitate for a second to lie in a good cause. They think lying is a virtue.

[mrustow]

Peer review is only as good or bad as the peers. Often, peer review is a mere formality. The one time I submitted a scholarly article for publication, I made sure to politick for it behind the scenes, long before submitting it. Since I was only a lowly adjunct, the "peer review" panel didn't consider me a "peer," and all the work of researching, writing, and re-writing a huge ms. would otherwise have been a waste.

The article was published, with no negative comments. However, one of the peer reviewers later insulted me in a weirdly pedantic way. He published a letter in a later issue of the journal, in which he praised the more influential author of an article on a much different topic, and then suggested a number of consequences of the other man's article (as if they had just occurred to him) -- all of which were the very issues I had addressed explicitly and at length in MY article. The character had the nerve to say that no one had addressed the issues. This was his way, I guess, of putting me in my place, as an adjunct.

I'm convinced that much of what allegedly is done in the humanities and social sciences in the name of "peer review" by "blind" readers is actually based on rigged games, whether the journal is socialist or consevative. Most academics are either unable or unwilling to look at research and arguments based on the meirts, as opposed to based on the authority or pedigree of the person making them.

[mrustow]

Eric Foner, from the First Family of red American historians!

[RKV]

Bellesiles book will continue to be cited and will continue to be noted as winning the Bancroft prize.

[EBUCK]

I would rather be judged fit or unfit by my fellow hunters and shooters than by a DOJ full of Gloria Allreds.

Yup, if I'm to be judged worthy of retaining my rights, let it be by my peers rather than an obscure bureaucrat who's only mission in life is to keep getting a "free" ride.

EBUCK

[SauronOfMordor]

what an interesting man is Cramer

Clayton is cool. I had many conversations with him over the net about 10 years ago when we were both on a firearms discussion list. I've got his book "For the Defense of Themselves and the State", which is a very well-researched book on the legal history of the 2nd Amendment and gun control. I remember him having huge problems finding a publisher for it.

[Centurion2000]

bump

[EBUCK]

After reading by mrustow's post I must clarify..

let it be by my peers (crediantials notwithstanding) rather than an obscure bureaucrat

EBUCK

[Fiddlstix]

Bump

[Charles Martel]

Conservative good deeds are simply NOT to be discussed in any positive light by liberals...

No surprise there. The media claims to be unbiased, but it suffers from the same liberal inbreeding that afflicts academia. From the article...

"Unfortunately, it seems to me that the Bellesiles scandal exposed the lack of political diversity within the profession. You see, at least part of why historians swallowed Arming America’s preposterous claims so readily is that it fit into their political worldview so well. I don’t mean that historians consciously decided not to look at Bellesiles’s claims because they were afraid of what they would find; I mean that Arming America said things, and created a system of thought so comfortable for the vast majority of historians, that they didn’t even pause to consider the possibility that something wasn’t right."

[El Gato]

That the state has a monopoly on credentials. If even one credentialed historian

I wasn't aware that any state licensed or certified historians. It's accademic credentials that are the key here, and there are many non-state universities granting them. In fact the two schools in question here, Emory and Columbia are both non-state schools, AFAIK. As are many of the hotbeds of academic political correctness and liberalism.

Plus Cramer is not without some credentials himself, having a Master's in History, just not the vaunted Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD) degree. He also is a widely published author, in both law reviews and historical journals.

[beckett]

People like Eric Foner, responsible for steering the Bancroft Prize to Bellisles, don't hesitate for a second to lie in a good cause.

Foner has exceptionally dirty hands in this episode, I agree. His fingerprints are all over the promotion of this patently false piece of "scholarship."

[EBUCK]

I should have stated "State Sanctioned" Credentials (which you cannot deny is the reality).

And at the time of the initial bruhaha he wasn't in posession of his MA was he? Still a graduate I thought.

EBUCK

[beckett]

The article was published, with no negative comments. However, one of the peer reviewers later insulted me in a weirdly pedantic way. He published a letter in a later issue of the journal, in which he praised the more influential author of an article on a much different topic, and then suggested a number of consequences of the other man's article (as if they had just occurred to him) -- all of which were the very issues I had addressed explicitly and at length in MY article. The character had the nerve to say that no one had addressed the issues. This was his way, I guess, of putting me in my place, as an adjunct.

An interesting "inside baseball" anecdote. Thanks for sharing it. Weirdly pedantic indeed.

[mrustow]

Sure thing. Thank goodness I got published, so that I can't be accused of mere "sour grapes," though I suppose some pedant might still throw logic to the wind, and try.

[tpaine]

bump

[Frohickey]

Cramer is an ace. Too bad that no one with his political views will ever get a tenured chair of history at a major university.

Yeah, but at least Cramer is richer than most history professors.

[RKV]

As another person with an undergraduate degree in history who got into software, then got an MBA (not an MA in history like Cramer), I can tell you from personal experience the money IS better outside the halls of ivy. I had a similar problem, philosophically as Cramer did, white, male, christian, conservative and heterosexual didn't really look to be the kind of person who was going to get hired and earn tenure. I was interested in some of the same things - colonial America (north and south) etc. because of family history/documents, too. Just couldn't get into deconstructing the past. The real thing (original sources) was interesting, the horsesh*t I was reading in the journals was pathetic.

[TigersEye]

Hey Bellethiles! You don't know buttcrack about history do ya? Hit the bricks, liar.

[beckett]

By the way, speaking of Bowling for Columbine, there is a passage in Cramer's article that could just as well have been written to describe the serious flaws in Moore's so-called "documentary:"

...[Bellesiles] helped to create the Violence Studies Program at Emory University—a program that the Henry Frank Guggenheim Foundation criticized because its readings were, "too subjective, full of unexamined assumptions and strikingly unrepresentative of most of these crimes. These choices seem calculated to heighten the emotionalism with which students approach these issues, which can get in the way of rational understanding."