Moving On

The New Criterion and National Review portray Bellesiles as a typical New Left radical historian--but he's not. He told me he had been a registered Republican and John McCain supporter until he recently switched to register as a Democrat. He describes himself as a "Burkean conservative" who believes in "tradition and authority"--and he's also a longtime gun owner who only recently gave up skeet shooting. He told the Chronicle of Higher Education he was rethinking "what it means to be a Christian and own guns."

He has won support from leading scholarly organizations, including the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, which passed resolutions deploring the harassment and abuse directed at him. But last spring Emory responded to the campaign to fire Bellesiles by appointing a secret outside committee to review the case. The committee's findings were supposed to be announced in late summer, but instead the university released a statement on August 22 that "Professor Michael Bellesiles will be on paid leave from his teaching duties at Emory University during the fall semester. The University's inquiry regarding Arming America...is continuing." Bellesiles is using the time to re-create the probate records that were lost in the flood, travelling to archives. The student newspaper, The Emory Wheel, claimed in a September 24 story that a report by the independent committee had indeed been issued, but the paper provided no details beyond saying that Bellesiles is appealing it. Emory spokesperson Jan Gleason would confirm only the statement of interim provost Woody Hunter--that "the appeals process would finish soon." Apparently the penalty Emory is considering is demotion. Bellesiles said he could not comment.

Bellesiles is preparing a second edition of Arming America for Vintage Books, though its fate is uncertain. The book's editor, Jane Garrett at Knopf, told me, "We have the new introduction and some other corrections in hand," including a lot of new material from probate records--but she said that a revised edition could not appear until fall 2003 for marketing reasons, and that a final decision has not yet been made. The original introduction opened with the contemporary debate on guns and criticized Charlton Heston and the NRA. That has been cut from the new introduction, a copy of which Bellesiles provided me, and which is strictly historical--it opens with Ben Franklin worrying in 1776 that the colonies lacked guns, and proposing instead that they fight the British with "bows and arrows," which "are more easily provided everywhere than muskets and ammunition." The new introduction also replies to critics from the gun rights movement, declaring that "this book is a work of history" that does not seek to "undermine or endorse current efforts at gun control." The new introduction reprises some of the debates on his work and acknowledges as well problems in relying on probate records. He concludes by restating the thesis of the book, that gun culture in America is "an invented tradition," a product of the Civil War era rather than the colonial period. This is the book's real contribution, and it remains a significant one.

Michael Zuckerman, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and a prominent Americanist, sums it up this way: "The critics' stuff on the probate inventories is bad news for Michael, but the book in no way depends on that. He's got myriad arguments. If people are so crazy about guns, why are there so few gun sellers? So few gun manufacturers? Why do they need a government subsidy? The critics are casting about for a way to discredit him, and they have fixated on the probate inventories, which is crackpot. They have refused to confront the cumulative force and extent of the argument. In fact, the argument is splendid."

Michael Kammen, past president of the Organization of American Historians, has not withdrawn his statement that Arming America is "a classic work of significant scholarship with inescapable policy implications." The Bancroft Prize committee decided not to rescind the award. Garry Wills and Edmund Morgan have refused demands that they withdraw or alter their published praise for the book. And the debate over the meaning of the Second Amendment is not going to be resolved by counting guns in early America, anyway.

Perhaps the secret Emory review board has come up with new evidence, though that seems to me unlikely. Barring that, in the end, despite dozens of researchers devoting weeks and months to checking every line in the 125 pages of notes at the end of Arming America, the critics have come up with errors but have produced no proof of intentional deception, no proof of invented documents, no proof of fraud.

But the campaign against Bellesiles has demonstrated one indisputable fact: Historians whose work challenges powerful political interests like the NRA better make sure all their footnotes are correct before they go to press.

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