Recently I eased my cogitative boat into an interview found via a new, online history publication called Contingent Magazine, recently begun and edited by some fine and approachable historians I follow on Twitter. The magazine describes its purpose as follows: "Contingent is a nonprofit magazine for everyone who asks questions about the past. Our contributors are largely historians outside the traditional professoriate -- adjuncts, museum workers, librarians, park rangers, grad students, high school teachers. They are all paid." Via Twitter I learned of the editors' efforts to establish a modest, monthly budget for paying contributors. I'm somebody who can't pass buskers on the street without chipping in something. Here was history busking outside the concert hall of academe. I chipped in.
But not until after I had listened to the interview, a production of The Age of Jackson Podcast sponsored by the Andrew Jackson Hermitage and hosted by Daniel Gullotta, a Ph.D. student in religious studies at Stanford University.
Rather than summarize the interview here (there'll be more downstream), at this point I'll just say that I found its subject matter irresistible, in the same way you would find it irresistible if you were out on the street and ran into an old acquaintance who -- clearly the worse for wear -- said, "Boy, do I have a story."
Back in 2000 I was blown away by Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, written by Michael Bellesiles, a history professor at Emory University. Among other things, it recounted and documented the failure of an important American experiment: a well-regulated militia of all military-age citizens (c. 18-50) whose self-armed constancy and patriotism would obviate the need for a standing army. And when I say "failure," I mean dismal, embarrassing, "what-the-fuck-were-we-thinking?" failure so that within just a couple-score years, three at the most, what was at the beginning (1787) bruited by Federalists and Anti-federalists alike as an institution essential to American republicanism had become a literal laughingstock.
This was my first encounter with this history, with the fact that it happened. I was less interested in Bellesiles' larger thesis about the Civil War being a watershed event that ushered into American society a "gun culture" that had previously not existed. I was just really, really impressed by how badly the Founding Fathers had screwed up on the militia thing.
What happened soon thereafter was that I in my capacity of public library director had to address a request that Arming America -- due to well-publicized flaws in some of its research having mostly to do with probate records -- be removed from the collection or given a warning label of some sort in the front of the book. Thanks to American Library Association stances on intellectual freedom, I was able to keep the book unlabeled on the shelf.
But in effect the book as a whole was discredited, even if only part of its research had been called into question, and none of that (as far as I knew at the time) had to do with the militia, my area of interest. This was altogether a disappointment to me, because the book had been broadly informative, quite well written, and had left me looking forward to great things from author Bellesiles. Instead, thanks to the controversy, he dropped from view.
Every now and then I wondered what happened to him. So when on Aug. 24 Contingent put up an interview with him, it very much was like running into that long-lost, beaten-up acquaintance on the street.
Every now and then I wondered what happened to him. So when on Aug. 24 Contingent put up an interview with him, it very much was like running into that long-lost, beaten-up acquaintance on the street.
Interviewer Gullotta draws out a relatable Bellesiles on a wide range of topics (how to put a twist on an Old Fashioned; some refreshing home truths about what bullshitters -- my word -- Jefferson and Tocqueville were), but necessarily central is the book that took him to the heights of the history profession -- it won the prestigious Bancroft prize -- before the reverberations of its faults plunged him near to the nadir. Acknowledging that there are "a couple of specific errors in my research" and "a few pagination errors" in his footnotes, Bellesiles stands by his work: "I know of no research that undercuts the main findings of my book." Yes, the probate records contained "significant errors," but he points out that they relate to an insignificant portion of his book ("three paragraphs") and that he later worked to correct the information with a website and in a second edition of the book released necessarily with a different publisher -- Soft Skull Press -- because the initial publisher -- Knopf -- "rescinded" an offer to re-publish it.
Yet in Bellesiles' telling Knopf is partly (largely?) to blame for the tempest that seems to have caught him off guard. An academic publisher, he suggests, would've vetted it better, and its career would've been satisfactorily typical: offered as "the beginning of a discussion among historians," it would be read "almost entirely by scholars" and then subjected to the drip-drip-drip of academic, peer argumentation. Instead, it became red meat for a dogfight over gun rights, with gun control advocates on one side, ginned up by Knopf's dust cover polemical endorsements including one that calls Bellesiles "the NRA's worst nightmare;" and on the other the NRA and its minions, who according to Bellesiles "launched a coordinated paragraph-by-paragraph search for errors" -- turning up only seven in 1,300 footnotes" -- as well as an assault on Bellesiles' credibility using a weaponized Internet (at the time still developing into the monster it is today) that he characterizes as "swiftboating." All of this, he says, because the subject was firearms.
The interview -- which you should by all means listen to -- clearly reveals Bellesiles to have been shattered by the experience. My wondering about him was not just the musings of a provincial librarian, either. He dropped from view to the extent that Gullotta says he had to resort to some "crazy Google Foo" to find him. Bellesiles regrets publishing the book and pines for anonymity. He won't say which educational press he does editing for because he doesn't want the trolls to beleaguer them with hate mail. When Gullotta asks how a reader might approach the book should they come upon it, say, in a library, Bellesiles says, "Read it with an open mind, and without yet exploring the criticisms of it. Judge first for yourself, and then explore the criticisms. Try not to tell anyone you're reading it, because you may get some hostile responses. And hopefully do some research for yourself; look into the source materials, which are rich and full. And that's where life is, is in the source documents."
Contingent has made it easy to "explore the criticisms." Editor Bill Black appended to the interview the links to "additional resources" that include the principal documents generated by the controversy, mostly from 2002-3: a forum in the William and Mary Quarterly, an article in the Yale Law Journal entitled "Fall from Grace," the inquisitional-sounding Report of the Investigative Committee in the Matter of Professor Michael Bellesiles, and Bellesiles' own rebuttal pamphlet, Weighed in an Even Balance.
Grateful as I was to hear Bellesiles' side of things and to learn what has transpired since, I couldn't help but wonder, listening to the interview, why revisit this controversy? What about it has attracted the attention of younger scholars like Gullotta and Black? Is there, perhaps, some interest in rehabilitating Bellesiles and his book?
With this interview -- preceded and "balanced" on the AofJ podcast by one with Joyce Lee Malcolm, a severe detractor who says Bellesiles, far from being taken aback at the furore, was at the forefront of the polemics from the outset -- Gullotta is generating original material that could be used for some kind of re-assessment. He hints at some credit for Bellesiles' introducing the idea of a "gun culture" in America; by and large, though, he appears mostly fascinated by the scandal in and of itself.
Black followed up on the Bellesiles interview with an article in TheWeek that examines the case in order to address the question of how "academic historians should function within the public sphere. At what point does relevancy [his emphasis] undermine rigor?" The forces of the history marketplace, Black says, dictate a turn away from "quote-unquote serious scholarship": with tenured positions requiring peer-reviewed publishing becoming thin on the ground, trained historians face financial pressure to "create a brand for themselves" through such extramural, Internet-centric devices as self-promotion on social media and articles lacking the filter of peer review. The moral of the Bellesiles case, post-interview, seems to be that his professional remorse (I wish I'd played it safe with an academic publisher) simply points to the fact that this nostalgic alternative dates from an idyllic past less and less available to trained historians. Say Black, "It doesn't make much sense to ask whether or how historians should come down from the ivory tower, when a growing number of them are never up there in the first place."
An irony here is that one of the central players in the Bellesiles controversy was an amateur historian: Clayton Cramer, a writer on gun history topics with a history MA but by profession a software engineer, figures as a more-rigorous-than-thou correcting laborer to the academic Bellesiles' sloppy citations, which provoked Bellesiles to respond on one occasion (in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct. 27, 2000) by calling Cramer a "non-historian." Rigor, perhaps, doesn't inhere to the ivory tower alone.
In fact, if there is anyone in the whole hooraw that can be said to be a harbinger for the current malaise in the employment of historians that Black says forces them out into the general job market and onto the Internet, it is Cramer, not Bellesiles. In a c. Jan. 2003 online article for History News Network (an organ of George Washington University) Cramer speaks to just these issues: Unable to support a family while pursuing a career in the academy, he became a software engineer; unable to attract serious, continuing attention from historians with his findings about Bellesiles' errors, he put up a web page in an effort to publicize them. From there -- early on, anyway -- it seems to have been controversy waged on the Internet -- with Bellesiles withdrawing, according to Gullotta's interviewee Joyce Malcolm in a Reason article, in which she also credits the nonacademic press (National Review, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe) for spreading the word about the problems with Arming America that the history academy at first ignored. Yes, once they got there they turned on Bellesiles with a vengeance, but the early days of the controversy seem to complicate Black's contention that historians did not stand behind Bellesiles. If they did not stand behind Bellesiles, they at least seem to have demonstrated a passive aggression against Cramer -- not a peer -- that drove him in frustration to pursue a more independent route to publicize his concern for "scholarly integrity" and "the credibility of the historical profession."
"Disingenuous" seems to be a word often used to describe Bellesiles, but along these lines it particularly seems to apply to a remark in the interview that, on any other subject than guns, he and Cramer would be able to "appear together at a conference," when it is much more likely that Cramer's lack of institutional bona fides would prevent his being invited in the first place. The "class" division that Contingent has undertaken to confront (bypass?) is real, and Cramer's experience in the Bellesiles matter elucidates its mystification (oh how I love that concept) to the extent that Cramer himself seems to blame the prejudice against him on lack of ideological diversity in the academy (too many liberals) rather than a much more basic, reluctantly-surrendered professional snobbery.
For what it's worth, Cramer makes a big deal of calling out Bellesiles on incorrectly quoting the text of the 1792 militia statute, the first to embody the organization under the Federal Constitution with its now-notorious 2nd Amendment. As Arming America was my first encounter with a detailed history of these laws, I did not catch it, but there it is on p. 230: the quote that says every citizen enrolled in the militia shall be provided with a musket, when in fact the statute says every enrolled citizen shall provide his own musket. Huge difference! However, in re-reading the book, I found clear evidence -- seemingly unnoticed by Cramer and uncited to my knowledge even by Bellesiles in his own defense -- that this was an unintentional error, an instance of his getting tangled in the tares of his own sloppiness: subsequently, on p. 262, Bellesiles writes, "In theory every member of the militia supplied his own gun, as the Militia Act of 1792 required."
There you have it -- in my mind anyway -- the problem with Arming America in a nutshell: not fraud, as some have alleged and continue so to do (in full fury: peruse the lynch mob that is the comments section on Bellesiles' revised, Soft Skull edition book website), but a display of a head-scratchingly high degree of reported discrepancy between text and citation.
Nothing can be taken at face value on either side in this bramble patch, as some of the gotchas turn out to be wrong, and the accusers show themselves in as bad a light as the person they accuse. Malcolm, for example -- a fully frocked academic as much as Bellesiles -- tries to score a point by truncating his statement that "[m]ost personal violence in early modern England occur not on lonely highways but at public festivals, often between competing teams of Morris dancers and such other representatives of community pride." [Arming America, p. 36] Malcolm's version of the quote ends at "dancers," which clearly changes the scope of Bellesiles' assertion; she then scoffs, "Bellesiles assertion that these charming, white-costumed folk dancers, sporting bells at their knees, were responsible for most of the era's violence struck one British historian as Monty Pythonesque."
Since the fighting Morris dancers seem particularly absurd to Malcolm -- indeed, she doubles down on the criticism in the interview with Gullotta, where she says she examined the sources and "not one of them said what he said" (AofJ Podcast 081 10:30-11:20), I decided to follow Bellesiles' footnote to the source: Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603-1660, by David Underdown, p. 69. Well, p. 69 has nothing about Morris dancers, but a little experience with Bellesiles teaches you some basic gumshoe, and sure enough on p. 96 there's a description of a fight at a local revel involving leg-belled, "apparently innocent" Morris dancers that resulted in "a bloody affray." So Bellesiles got the fact right, included it in a qualified generalization that Malcolm distorted, but cited the wrong page. Faults all around!
Once again in this regard it is the "non-historian" Cramer who is most dependable and also the most damning, but even his claim to be able to find errors "on almost any page, picked at random" requires testing. I took this "pick a page, any page" challenge for a short ride. Mostly using HathiTrust to check official sources, I did find a number of errors, most of them along the lines of the mis-cited morris dancer page, but accuracy prevailed over the handful of pages whose handful of citations I was able to check, given my limited, provincial library resources and the time constraints of interlibrary loan. My feeling is that Cramer might be overstating his case somewhat, but it has enough basis that I feel the need to scour same pages in the the second edition to see if Bellesiles did indeed revise or correct these mistakes as he claims to have done in the interview.
This being the case, the book remains strongly suggestive, although his laying out of a "lack of a gun culture" thesis is easy to nitpick (as Cramer does) due to lack of precision, e.g. "gun censuses" that report only military-grade firearms are necessarily incomplete. If nothing else it is a great bibliographic resource. However, it would seem impossible for the book to be used as a citation without first double-checking its sources. But after all -- to give Bellesiles the last word -- the "life" of history is with those source materials, "which are rich and full."
Which, for the most part, cannot be said about historians. Well, "full," maybe. Keep some deserving ones that way by supporting Contingent!
