By Brian Carnell

Wednesday, October 30, 2002

The Nation hit a new low point (is that possible?) with a ridiculous hatchet job by Jon Wiener directed at critics of discredited Emory historian Michael Bellesiles. In a situation it could have easily avoided, Wiener's article hit the stands at almost the same time that an independent review board set up by Emory confirmed the numerous problems with Bellesiles research and Bellesiles resigned from Emory.

For those not following the ins and outs of this case, Bellesiles is the author of the award-winning Arming America which was heralded for its startling thesis -- Bellesiles claimed that gun ownership was relatively rare in America prior to the middle of the 19th century. This was, of course, a widely discusses claim due to the implications it has for Second Amendment scholarship, and in fact Bellesiles was one of a number of historians who filed a legal brief in a gun rights case arguing that the Second Amendment was not intended to confer a right to individual citizens to own guns.

Criticism of Bellesiles books initially came from pro-gun rights groups and individuals, helped along by the Internet, and spread to academic critics who examined Bellesiles claims and found numerous problems with the evidence Bellesiles cited to support his claim. That culminated this month in the Emory report and Bellesiles resignation.

But in his article, Wiener will have none of it. Bellesiles is the victim of a vast right wing conspiracy and any evidence to the contrary is simply not fit to print within the pages of The Nation.

For example, Wiener writes,

What started as a politically motivated effort by the gun lobby and its supporters has expanded to include several scholars and historians who have devoted weeks and months to checking Bellesiles's footnotes in the archives where he did his research--a practice that is extremely unusual in historical scholarship. They have found that there are indeed some problems, especially with Bellesiles's use of probate records.

This Bellesiles has admitted, and he's offered an explanation: that a flood in April 2000 at the history office building at Emory destroyed his notes on the probate records (and also seriously damaged most of the rest of the offices--the university says the damage totaled almost a million dollars). Bellesiles's book manuscript was safe, but his probate notes were on yellow legal pads on a chair--admittedly an archaic mode of record storage--rather than on computer, and were turned to "unreadable pulp." After the flood he went to work trying to re-create the notes, and when his book was published a few months later, he posted notices on several history websites warning that his original notes on the probate records had been destroyed. (The lengths that critics will go to discredit Bellesiles are at least creative: Professor Jerome Sternstein of Brooklyn College put a dozen legal pads in his own shower for thirty minutes and reported to the world that they survived "intact and virtually unscathed"!)

But this ignores the many problems with Bellesiles "the flood ate my homework" claim. First, he only offered it as an excuse after many months of prodding to provide sources for some of his claims in Arming America. Second, Sternstein's 30 minute shower is not as odd as it sounds considering that Emory University maintains the flood that hits Bellesiles' office lasted only 25 minutes. As Sternstein writes in a response to Wiener's article,

What Wiener does not say is that the "creative" and simple experiment he mocks was undertaken when the person hired by Emory to handle the cleanup of the History Department building, an expert in water damage, told me flatly that it would be impossible to destroy, or "pulp" Bellesiles's penciled yellow legal pads during the Emory "flood." Perhaps many weeks or months of continuous soaking might do the trick, he said, but the note pads would certainly survive intact and almost as good as new after the 25 minutes or more of water dripping on them from Bellesiles's office ceiling.

According to Sternstein, even Bellesiles seems to recognize that his flood story won't wash, and has been claiming of late that the flood lasted 6 hours which contradicts the very Emory report on the flooding which Bellesiles himself had cited as proof that the incident actually happened.

Why are the records allegedly destroyed in this flood so important? Wiener writes,

The charges raised by [James] Lindgren and dozens of others (including Alexander Cockburn in the April 8 Nation) have largely focused on one footnote to a table in the appendix to Arming America, which lists forty counties around the United States as sources of probate records--including San Francisco. That seemed unlikely to many historians, who know the San Francisco archives were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire. Bellesiles had re-created from memory the list of the counties where he researched probate records, after the flood destroyed his notes. He went back to San Francisco and found the documents in question across the bay, in the Contra Costa County archives. He photocopied and distributed the documents in question and posted examples on his website (www.emory.edu/HISTORY/BELLESILES/index.html). They are indeed headed "City and County of San Francisco." The Contra Costa archivists confirm that the documents are real--and that they come from the Contra Costa County archives, not San Francisco. That's error, not fraud.

This account reads like a bad joke. First, this single table is extremely important since, without it, Bellesiles book would have likely gone largely unnoticed outside of American history specialists. It is these probate records, which Bellesiles claimed showed a relatively low level of gun ownership, that garnered Arming America such praise.

As for the fraud charge, it might be easier to support Wiener's view if this version of events wasn't Bellesiles fourth or fifth cover story. Bellesiles originally sent an e-mail to Lindgren claiming that he had read all of his probate records on microfilm in the East Point, GA Federal Archive. This was patently impossible, so Bellesiles claimed that Lindgren was lying about the e-mail. Except that Bellesiles also made the claim in an interview on WBEZ public radio in Chicago (when data Bellesiles posted on his web site also turned out not to be what he claimed it was, Bellesiles charged that someone must have hacked his web site and placed the faulty data there).

Then Bellesiles changed his story to claim that he read the San Francisco probate records at the Superior Court there, only to have others point out that the records in question were destroyed in the 1906 fire. Finally he settled on a story that he read the records at the California History Center. There is no such organization, but there is a Contra County History Center. Unfortunately, not only do they have no record of Bellesiles visiting at any time prior to 2002, but their probate records (including several that Bellesiles faxed to the media) are for Contra County, not San Francisco.

That is the pattern of somebody trying to commit fraud, not somebody caught in an innocent error.

Wiener is also way off-base when he claims that all of the errors found in Arming America relate solely to the probate records. In fact, dozens of major errors have been founding in Bellesiles book, which Wiener conveniently omits from his article. Wiener mentions a Yale Law Review written by Lindgren, but conveniently forgets to mention that article's Appendix which lists more than 200 errors in Arming America, most of them similar to the problems with probate records, with Bellesiles' book misrepresenting his sources in a way that favors his claim that gun ownership was relatively rare in the United States prior to the middle of the 19th century.

Wiener also engages in some pretty bizarre spin,

Garry Wills and Edmund Morgan have refused demands that they withdraw or alter their published praise for the book.

True, neither historian has formally withdrawn his respective positive review of Arming America, but both Wills and Morgan have made statements in recent months acknowledging that Arming America is not credible. When Wills was asked to speak on a panel to defend Bellesiles book, his reply was that "nobody defends him." Well, except maybe for the hacks at The Nation.

And why The Nation would want to jump on Bellesiles bandwagon at this point is difficult to imagine. Emory's outside review board had reached its conclusions a few months ago, only to have Bellesiles appeal their findings. Although the findings were kept secret until the appeal was finished, it wasn't hard to read between the lines and concluded the independent review board's conclusions were not favorable to Bellesiles and that he would likely end up leaving Emory one way or another. Similarly, although Wills and Morgan have not formally withdrawn their praise for Arming America, their recent statements criticizing the book make it likely that they were simply waiting for Emory's review process to conclude before taking action and that at some point they will withdraw their positive reviews.

Maybe The Nation simply doesn't care -- the chance at giving the ideological faithful a shot in the arm with a feel good story about a lone professor standing up to a right wing gun nut cabal may have been too good to pass up, even if it wasn't true.

Source:

Shooting the Messenger: Jon Wiener on Arming America. Jerome Sternstein, History News Network, October 28, 2002.

Fire At Will. Jon Wiener, The Nation, November 4, 2002.

Discuss (4 Replies) | Printer Friendly