Emory's Bellesiles Report: A Case of Tunnel Vision

Jon Wiener

Hanna H. Gray, Stanley Katz, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich--the committee that investigated charges of fraud in Michael Bellesiles's book Arming America for Emory University--made a serious mistake at the outset of their work: They agreed to limit their report to answering five narrow questions posed by the Emory University administration, and to avoid the larger issues of the significance of their findings. They also avoided any comment on what sanctions, if any, would be appropriate. The result is a report marred by a kind of tunnel vision.

Bellesiles's book challenges the conventional view that eighteenth-century America had a vibrant gun culture, and argues instead that our present gun culture was created in the Civil War era. Because of this contention, Arming America has been under attack since before its publication by gun rights advocates, and more recently by scholars who criticized Bellesiles's research (see Jon Wiener, "Fire at Will," The Nation, 4 November 2002, 28-32). The day the report was published, Bellesiles announced he was resigning his tenured position at Emory.

The committee concluded that Bellesiles's research into probate records was "unprofessional and misleading" as well as "superficial and thesis-driven," and that his earlier explanations of errors "raise doubts about his veracity." But they found "evidence of falsification"; only on one page: Table 1, "Percentage of probate inventories listing firearms." Bellesiles omitted two years from the table, which covered almost a century from 1765 to 1859. The two years, 1774 and 1775, would have shown more guns.

By limiting their focus to a few pages in a big book, Gray, Katz, and Ulrich failed to consider two larger questions raised by their findings:

1. How significant are the problems they found for the book as a whole? Gray, Katz and Ulrich not only avoid this question in their report, but also refused to answer afterwards when asked directly. Ulrich's e-mail response to me was characteristic: "I'm sure you can understand why it wouldn't be appropriate for me to comment."

In fact, the probate records criticized by the committee are referred to only in a handful of paragraphs in a four-hundred page book, and Table 1 is cited in the text only a couple of times. If Bellesiles had omitted all of the probate data that the committee and others have criticized, the book's argument would remain a strong one, supported by a wide variety of other evidence that the committee did not challenge.

2. What is the appropriate penalty for omitting 1774 and 1775 from Table 1? Gray, Katz, and Ulrich did not say in their report, and refused to answer when I asked them. Before the report was completed, Emory officials had said the possibilities ranged from a letter of reprimand to demotion to termination. Was any action by Bellesiles's employer justified--or is the harsh criticism Bellesiles has received from within the profession penalty enough? Again the committee members refuse to answer.

Bellesiles in his reply explained that he omitted 1774 and 1775 not to deceive readers, but because those years were not relevant to his thesis: "the colonial governments were passing out firearms to the members of their militia . . . in preparation for the expected confrontation with Great Britain" therefore these two years give "an inaccurate portrait of peacetime gun ownership" by individuals. If Bellesiles had stated that in a note to Table 1, would the committee have found no "evidence of falsification"? They decline to answer.

Arming America was the subject of a series of critical articles in the William and Mary Quarterly in 2001. The same issue also contained a series of articles on a book about Denmark Vesey, executed for plotting slave rebellion in Charleston in 1822. (See Jon Wiener, "Denmark Vesey: A New Verdict," The Nation, Feb. 21, 2002, 21-24.) The Vesey book was shown to have transcription errors on virtually every page, which undermined the author's entire thesis. The publisher withdrew the book. But there has been no move in the history profession to investigate or discipline that historian, and his university has taken no action--because the scholarly criticism and the publisher's action were deemed sufficient. In the Bellesiles case, the parallel would be the publication of a revised edition with errors corrected. Indeed, Bellesiles had conceded serious problems in his probate data, and was working on correcting those errors when he and his publisher parted ways in early January. His plans included a corrected version of Table 1. Do Gray, Katz, and Ulrich consider that an appropriate resolution of the problems they found? They refuse to say.

The context of the debate over Arming America is crucial to understanding the problems with the committee's report. Gun rights groups have been working to discredit the book and destroy Bellesiles's career since before the book was published--they see it as "anti-gun," partly because the introduction criticized Charlton Heston and the NRA. (In fact, the debate over gun control is not going to be decided on the basis of an argument about whether our present gun culture began in the mid-nineteenth century.) Instead of focusing on the book's thesis or claims made about its contemporary significance, their strategy has been to try to discredit it by focusing attention on errors in a tiny portion of the documentation. It's an old tactic, and an illogical one--the book could be wrong about the origins of our present gun culture even if its footnotes are flawless. But the tactic often works.

By accepting the terms of debate set by others, Gray, Katz, and Ulrich abdicated their intellectual responsibility to work independently and to consider the significance of their findings. As a result, their report has ominous implications for other historians dealing with controversial issues. Of course every historian has an obligation to provide full and accurate citations of evidence in a form that makes it possible for others to replicate their work. But I know of one historian coming up for tenure who, after reading the Emory report on Bellesiles, decided to remove all the tables from his book manuscript, to treat the evidence anecdotally instead, in order to avoid facing the same kind of critique.

Since the issue here is Bellesiles's integrity as a historian, the Emory inquiry should have been as sweeping as the stakes, instead of being tied to a few pages in a great big book. And if Bellesiles is right in his reply <http://www.emory.edu/central/NEWS/Releases/B_statement.pdf>, then Gray, Katz and Ulrich are guilty of some of the same sins they accuse him of committing: suppressing inconvenient evidence, spinning the data their way, refusing to follow leads that did not serve their thesis. The point is not to condemn them for their inability to achieve the scrupulousness they demanded of Bellesiles. The point is that historians have to deal with the messy confusion of things, and they offer interpretations of it. Historian Michael Zuckerman of the University of Pennsylvania says, "Historical knowledge advances by the testing of interpretations, not by stifling interpreters"--and not by indicting the interpreter's character for flaws in his Table 1.

Jon Wiener is professor of history at the University of California, Irvine.