Fool Me Once, Part 2
Scott McLemee—essayist, critic and blogger at Inside Higher Ed—takes a look at the publisher’s statement for historian Michael Bellesiles’ forthcoming book 1877: America’s Year of Living Violently. (We recently talked about the Michael Bellesiles scandal here.)
From the publisher, New Press:
“A major new work of popular history, 1877 is also notable as the comeback book for a celebrated U.S. historian. Michael Bellesiles is perhaps most famous as the target of an infamous ‘swiftboating’ campaign by the National Rifle Association, following the publication of his Bancroft Prize-winning book Arming America (Knopf, 2000) — ‘the best kind of non-fiction,’ according to the Chicago Tribune — which made daring claims about gun ownership in early America. In what became the history profession’s most talked-about and notorious case of the past generation, Arming America was eventually discredited after an unprecedented and controversial review called into question its sources, charges which Bellesiles and his many prominent supporters have always rejected.”
McLemee reacts:
These sentences have absorbed and rewarded my attention for days on end. They are a masterpiece of evasion. The paragraph is, in its way, quite impressive. Every word of it is misleading, including “and” and “the.”
Bellesiles has a certain claim to fame, certainly, but not as “the target of an infamous ‘swiftboating’ campaign.” He is, and will be forever remembered as, a historian whose colleagues found him to have violated his profession’s standards of scholarly integrity. Arming America won the Bancroft Prize — the highest honor for a book on American history. But far more salient is the fact that the Bancroft committee took the unprecedented step of withdrawing the prize.
McLemee’s not a big fan of supporters of the Second Amendment– he refers to them and members of the National Rifle Association (NRA) as gun nuts—but he doesn’t blame them for Bellesiles’ problem:
It is true that he drew the ire of the National Rifle Association, and I have no inclination to give that organization’s well-funded demagogy the benefit of any doubt. But gun nuts did not force Bellesiles to do sloppy research or to falsify sources. That his scholarship was grossly incompetent on many points is not a “controversial” notion. Nor is it open to dispute whether or not he falsified sources. That has been exhaustively documented by his peers. To pretend otherwise is itself demagogic.
McLemee contacted Bellesiles about the questions that are likely to be raised when the new book comes out:
It also seemed appropriate to get in touch with Bellesiles himself. He is currently an adjunct in history at Central Connecticut State University. I wrote to him to ask what he hoped the book would accomplish, given that his return to public life must necessarily include questions about his credibility. Had he taken any particular steps that would inspire confidence in someone who was acquainted with his colleagues’ findings about Arming America?
“I rest my credibility on the basic standards of scholarship,” he responded by e-mail, “and have done what every reputable historian does, and exactly what I did in Arming America: I cite my sources.”
At this point while reading his note, I found my eyes turning away from the screen in embarrassment. Eight years ago, when reputable historians found Bellesiles’s work to lack scholarly integrity, none of them claimed he had failed to cite sources. Anyone can cite sources. The pro-gun arguments of [research scientist and author] John Lott are decked out with the apparatus of scholarship, but that doesn’t mean his statistical claims aren’t dubious.
McLemee provides lots of links to the studies that can only be described as damning Bellesiles’ scholarship, including this:
At the request of Emory University, three prominent historians, assisted by graduate students, examined the evidence about Bellesiles’s work. In particular, they looked at his claims concerning what probate and militia records showed about gun ownership in early America — and, in what proved even more of a problem, at how he accounted for the discrepancies between what he claimed and what the archival records actually showed. The resulting “Report of the Investigative Committee in the Matter of Professor Michael Bellesiles,” released in October 2002, was devastating.
“We have interviewed Professor Bellesiles,” the committee reported, “and found him both cooperative and respectful of this process. Yet the best that can be said of his work with the probate and militia records is that he is guilty of unprofessional and misleading work. Every aspect of his work in the probate records is deeply flawed…. Subsequent to the allegations of research misconduct, his responses have been prolix, confusing, evasive, and occasionally contradictory. We are surprised and troubled that Bellesiles has not availed himself of the opportunities he has had since the notice of this investigation to examine, identify, and share his remaining research materials.”
The undeniable and overwhelming evidence leads McLemee to conclude:
So much for the myth of a scholar whose greatest crime was making “daring claims” that left him vulnerable to “swiftboating.” Michael Bellesiles’s greatest enemy was never the NRA. It was Michael Bellesiles.
1877: America’s Year of Living Violently comes out in August. The reviews should be interesting.
