Disarming history: how an award-winning scholar twisted the truth about America's gun culture—and almost got away with it - Michael Bellesiles criticized - Critical Essay

Reason, March, 2003 by Joyce Lee Malcolm

"Real historical writers probe factual uncertainties, but they do not invent convenient facts and they do not ignore inconvenient facts. People are entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts."

William Kelleher Storey, Writing History

WHEN THE Playboy interview with Michael Bellesiles appeared in January 2Q01, the Emory University history professor was riding high. He was basking in the heady glow of rave reviews and a media blitz hailing his book, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, as a "tour de force" that "changes everything?' Bellesiles claimed to have discovered that, contrary to accepted opinion, guns were scarce in early America and Americans were uninterested in owning them. "The notion that a well-armed public buttressed the American dream;' he assured readers, "would have appeared harebrained to most Americans before the Civil War." It was all an "invented tradition;' with historians joining "actively in the mythmaking." Reviewers of Arming America were quick to point out the "inescapable policy implications."

The Playboy interview ended with Beliesiles' challenge to the powerful gun lobby: "As for the NRA [National Rifle Association], when anyone talks about the history of guns in America, they're going to have to give me evidence--facts, not folktales." Three months later, despite growing skepticism, Arming America was awarded Columbia University's prestigious Bancroft Prize for the best work of American history published in 2000. It seemed the question of what was fact, what fiction, had been settled.

Bellesiles had flung his challenge at a political organization, but unfortunately for him it was the scholarly community that picked it up. The evidence he had presented for his groundbreaking theory was investigated first by experts from a range of disciplines and political viewpoints; then by a special symposium in a learned journal; and finally, as a result of the disturbing findings, by the professor's university and an outside panel of scholars that it appointed. The results are now in: Bellesiles' arguments are based on wholesale misuse of evidence and, in some cases, no evidence at all. The "invented tradition" is fact, the professor's version a folk tale.

The same month that Playboy published its interview with Bellesiles, my review of Arming America appeared in reason, one of the first publications to expose his errors. (See "Concealed Weapons," January 2001.) It formed part of what was to swell into an astonishing stream of revelations, most of which were immediately branded by Bellesiles and his supporters as politically motivated or trivial. Scholars and reporters who asked about Bellesiles' sources were treated to continually changing stories about where his research was conducted and the locations of his materials. Their inquiries were greeted, by turns, with injured innocence or vicious invective. Bellesiles had, he said, accidently stepped "into a minefield."

Bellesiles maintains that his book has been subjected to unfair, unprecedented scrutiny. The problem, he told a British reporter last spring, is that there are "some topics which perhaps should not be addressed," that "this is a dangerous environment [in which] to talk about firearms?' While Bellesiles admits to some errors in a handful of paragraphs, his response to the unfavorable report of Emory's investigative committee insists, "The overwhelming bulk of the evidence in support of this book's thesis remains unchallenged."

As we'll see, not only have virtually all aspects of his work been "challenged," but Bellesiles' critics have discovered wholesale and systematic misrepresentation of the historical evidence. If anything can be learned from this extraordinary episode, in which one of the most extravagantly praised scholarly books in many years has been exposed as one of the most fraudulent, it is the importance of maintaining rigorous intellectual standards even when they work against one's political preferences.

Scholarly Scahdals

Before we consider the bizarre twists and turns of the Bellesiles saga, the case should be put in context. Although the Arming America story ranks as the worst scandal to hit the American historical profession in recent memory, while it was unfolding three distinguished historians were exposed for dishonesty of one sort or another.

First came Joseph Ellis, professor of history at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, winner of the National Book Award for his biography of Thomas Jefferson and of a Pulitzer Prize for Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. In Ellis' case the integrity of his scholarship was not in question. Instead it was the stories of his experiences in the Vietnam War with which he regaled his students that proved his undoing. In June 2001 The Boston Globe revealed that Ellis' actual military experience consisted of ROTC at William and Mary College and teaching history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Although he claimed to have served in Gen. William Westmoreland's Vietnam headquarters and as leader of a platoon that passed near My Lai shortly before the 1968 massacre there, military records show that he never left the East Coast. In August 2001, as critics began to find more and more discrepancies in Bellesiles' work, Ellis was suspended for a year without pay.