|
Thursday, April 04, 2002
By
Glenn Harlan Reynolds
In the fall of 2000, professor Michael Bellesiles
of Emory University published his book Arming America, which
purported to establish that the core historical argument behind the
Second Amendment was a fraud.
The brave minuteman armed with his trusty rifle,
Bellesiles told us, was mostly a myth — Americans at the time of the
Revolution, and for many decades afterward, seldom owned guns, but
instead relied on the government for protection.
Bellesiles received glowing reviews in the New
York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the Atlantic
Monthly, and many other publications, from reviewers who were often
visibly pleased that he was sticking it to the National Rifle
Association.
As it turns out, the fraud was on Bellesiles’ end. At
least, that’s the conclusion of those who have examined his work — from
journalists, to historians, to law professors — and found it wanting.
Bellesiles turns out to have quoted sources out of
context, to have falsely reported data, and to have claimed to have used
documents that have not existed since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
One historian familiar with Bellesiles’ work called it a case of
"bona fide academic fraud." Emory University is investigating.
It is, I suppose, conceivable that Bellesiles will
manage to convince people that he was merely guilty of extraordinary
sloppiness and not outright fraud, but regardless of his state of mind,
his book is now well-established as untrustworthy.
Book review editor Karen Sandstrom of the Cleveland
Plain Dealer has written that the positive reviews that Arming
America received are evidence of a serious problem in the way
American book review editors do their job, especially with regard to
books that fit the editors’ preconceptions.
Yet despite all these problems with Bellesiles’ work,
many of the publications that afforded his book so much laudatory
attention when it came out have remained silent.
The New York Times belatedly ran news reports
on the Bellesiles scandal, after it was broken by the Wall Street
Journal, the National Review, and the Boston Globe.
But the New York Times Book Review — for whom Garry Wills wrote
on Sept. 10, 2000, "Bellesiles deflates the myth of the self-reliant
and self-armed virtuous yeoman of the Revolutionary militias" — has
published nothing on the subject (nor has Wills).
The Times even reran a portion of Wills’
laudatory review upon the publication of the paperback edition of Arming
America, well after it should have been obvious that Bellesiles’
work was seriously flawed.
Similarly, the New York Review of Books ran a
review on Oct. 19, 2000, by Edmund Morgan stating that "Bellesiles
may have overstated his case a little, but only a little...He has the
facts. [N]o one else has put them together in so compelling a refutation
of the mythology of the gun."
The New York Review of Books has not
published a retraction.
The Christian Science Monitor's review of Arming
America that ran on Sept. 7, 2000, cheerily predicted that "the
NRA will continue peddling its myths, oblivious of Bellesiles and his
annoying truths." The Christian Science Monitor has not
withdrawn this statement.
The Atlantic Monthly published a review in
its November 2000, issue that did point out some minor errors in
Bellesiles’ book. But it also wrote: "Bellesiles has made a detailed
study of the records of gun ownership and militia service...Blending
quantitative analysis with a careful reading of public documents, he
paints a new picture of the role of privately owned firearms in American
history: [before] the Civil War, relatively few Americans owned
guns."
A search of their site shows no mention of Bellesiles
since.
Publishers Weekly wrote on July 24, 2000,
"[H]is agenda, however, does not taint Bellesiles’ scholarship...he
painstakingly documents the relative absence of guns before the Civil
War." Publisher’s Weekly has not withdrawn or amended this
review.
Book Magazine, in its November/December 2000
issue wrote: "Thoroughly researched, when all of Bellesiles’
findings are assembled and put in their proper perspective, there is
little left standing to maintain the romantic notion of the gun as a
symbol of American greatness or freedom."
Book Magazine appears not to have
acknowledged the problems with Bellesiles’ book.
The Los Angeles Times Book Review wrote on
Sept. 17, 2000, "Bellesiles argues a brief against the myths that
align freedom with the gun." The Times Book Review has not
retracted this review.
The book review editors involved should not feel
terribly guilty for being taken in at the outset: Bellesiles’ book, after
all, fooled the Columbia University history department, which awarded him
the Bancroft Prize in April of 2001.
There is, perhaps, some blameworthiness in assigning
virulently anti-gun writers like Garry Wills — who were unlikely to exert
themselves by examining the evidence behind a thesis they clearly
cherished – to review Bellesiles’ book. But now that the book’s
credibility has been exploded, there is considerable blameworthiness in
failing to acknowledge that fact in the same pages where the book was
praised so fulsomely, less than two years ago.
To its credit, the Chronicle of Higher Education,
an academic newspaper that featured Bellesiles on its front page when Arming
America first appeared, gave similar front-page treatment to the
books problems. But not many have followed its lead. Why?
Some editors might say that, by now, their reviews of
Bellesiles’ book are old news — but of course, as the research for this
piece demonstrates, they are readily available on the Internet or via
other electronic research services. And one would think that book review
editors and publishers would feel an obligation to tell the public that
it has been led astray, with their unwitting assistance.
In the meantime, let the reader beware.
(Thanks to professor Eugene Volokh and the UCLA Law
Library, who provided some valuable research assistance.)
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a law professor at the
University of Tennessee and publishes InstaPundit.Com.
He is co-author, with Peter W. Morgan, of The Appearance of
Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government,
Business, and Society (The Free Press, 1997).
Respond to the Writer
|
