2 of 3

One indefatigable researcher, Clayton Cramer, checked a number of Bellesiles' sources and found that Bellesiles's use of them was frequently inaccurate, or slanted, or both. Indeed, the further Cramer dug, the more errors he found. Unlike most readers, for example, he was familiar with some of the 80 or so travel accounts Bellesiles cited, and he reported a disturbing pattern of selectivity and misleading paraphrase. Some of Cramer's criticisms misfired; he treated differences in interpretation as evidence of fraud. And sometimes he seemed to be guilty of distortion himself, as when he described as fraudulent Bellesiles's use of a passage in which George Washington criticized the militia. Cramer's point was that, in the source, Washington was referring to certain militia units only, not the militia in general, as Bellesiles implied. That is true—and Bellesiles's summary was to that degree inaccurate—but Cramer failed to add that there are other widely known examples in which Washington unequivocally criticizes the militia in general in the harshest terms.

Still, in many more cases Cramer presented compelling evidence that Bellesiles repeatedly had distorted what he found in his sources. This was especially the case whenever quantitative evidence was involved. On that front, the most devastating criticism came from James Lindgren, a professor of law at Northwestern University, who with Justin Heather reviewed Bellesiles's use of probate records. Bellesiles used these records to substantiate his claim that gun ownership in early America was much less common than generally believed, and many reviewers had singled out this evidence as particularly persuasive. In their article, "Counting Guns in Early America," Lindgren and Heather not only exposed inexplicable discrepancies between the data they reviewed and Bellesiles's presentation of it but also showed that some glaring errors should have been evident to any reviewers who simply took a closer look at Bellesiles's numbers. I hung my head in shame. In my review I had deliberately not referred to the probate records because I wasn't certain how compelling was the alleged evidence of guns' absence. But that was no excuse for an abject failure to think through the evidence as Bellesiles presented it.

Lindgren and Heather's article prompted a shift in the debate over Arming America. Until then, many historians had believed that while Bellesiles might have been guilty of some errors, still the attack on his book was fundamentally ideologically driven. Such was the tenor of a generous review by Roger Lane in the Journal of American History. But after "Counting Guns in Early America," it became increasingly hard to find historians who were willing to support Bellesiles, as was made clear in September 2001, a year after the book's publication, when two journalists—the Boston Globe's David Mehegan and National Review's Melissa Seckora—turned up the heat. Their investigative reporting brought the controversy to the attention of a much larger audience.

Given these widely aired charges of misuse of evidence and possible fabrication of data, Emory University, Bellesiles's institution, asked him to prepare a formal response. He had been posting piecemeal responses on his website, in some cases conceding that he may have been in error yet without clearly indicating the extent of such "error." Bellesiles's response, "Disarming the Critics," published in the newsletter of the Organization of American Historians, was posted on the OAH website early in November. It was a great disappointment to those who held out hope that he might still mount a credible defense.

next page... |  2 of 3

share this page