The Shot Heard Around the World

"Arming America" and the battle for our history

by David Rostcheck
Executive Director, North Bridge Training Institute

On Friday October 25, Emory University announced the resignation of professor Michael Bellesiles. Bellesiles' prizewinning book Arming America purported to prove the radical assertion that guns were rare and unimportant in early America and that our "gun culture" was a later invention grafted on to a bucolic, relatively gun-free country. An instant runaway success, Arming America gathered praise from most newspapers and major reviewers, eventually winning Columbia University's Bancroft Prize for History, and was cited before the 5th Circuit Court of the United States in the "U.S. v. Emerson" gun control case.

But historians from outside academia soon exposed Arming America as an academic fraud, a tome of revisionist history cobbled together from snippets of truth rearranged and rewritten to say the opposite of what they actually said. Worse still, its meteoric rise came while academic historians turned a blind eye to work they all knew to be historical falsehood. The success of Arming America represents a crime in which academia itself stands stained with guilt, and for which all academic historians will pay the price. The real legacy of Arming America goes far beyond exposing one academic as a revisionist liar. We are at the beginning, not the end, of the scandal's reverberations. The handling of Arming America may well mark the beginning of the end of the credibility of modern academia, the fall of the ivory tower, and the beginning of a new era of solid research.

Throughout the last decade, the great education reformer Camille Paglia predicted this outcome. Paglia warned that academia had become an Orwellian horror, robbing students of their education and substituting relativistic brainwashing instead. Speaking in Cambridge, almost in Harvard's backyard, she delivered a call to arms urging students to flee the Ivy League and its post-modernist influence and pursue a solid education in classical subjects that would reinforce, not cripple, their thinking. Many who loved learning and could have remained in the universities heeded Paglia's warning and pursued careers in industry. In their spare time they kept studying and researching, picking their way through primary data sources and classic works instead of the flighty post-modern tracts used in the universities. Now, with the research power of the internet at their disposal, historians and researchers from outside academia are beginning to produce works that are often more powerful and credible than those coming from inside universities.

For example, at the website constitution.org, the Constitution Society has developed an online Liberty Library of materials that puts university textbooks to shame. Driven by their desire to understand the Constitution and the historical development of the great ideas in it, they tracked down and digitized works that influenced the Founders. They compiled writings by William Penn, plays about Cato the Younger, essays by John Locke, and documents developing the theory of natural rights. Many of these materials have never before been accessible without significant effort (if at all). In over two hundred years of prior scholarship, no academic assembled a comparable resource for public education about the foundations of our law.

By comparison, the credibility of professional academics diminishes further every day. The publication of Arming America by the Alfred Knopf Co. saw historians, reviewers, and media personalities shower praise on a book whose radical premise should have raised intense skeptical inquiry. Those of us familiar with our nation's early history were shocked not only by the book's naked revisionist proposition, but also by academic historians' breathless praise for a view of history they all had to know was completely false. The presence and importance of guns in early America is so well defined that it is impossible to conduct any significant study of our early history at all without encountering it. Any professor at Harvard could literally have walked out of her office at lunchtime and read half a dozen plaques describing events whose history demolishes the book's propositions. Every history professor in the country should have had, and raised, serious concerns about the book's veracity. Yet, in academia's most shameful hour, tenured professors stood silent instead of expressing their reservations about the book. Many academics, like historian Gerry Wills, soiled their credibility by uncritically accepting the book's highly dubious premise and incorporating it into their own research.

The scandal over Arming America marks the first public conflict between the independent, internet-savvy libertarian researchers and their revisionist post-modernist academic counterparts. Despite all the haughty power and media bias the academic world could bring to bear, the libertarian historians scored a knockout - and they're just getting started.

A look at the official record of Emory's investigation of Bellesiles' research shows the insular academic world at work. Scholarly challenges in the William and Mary Quarterly led to Emory convening an internal committee, which then asked for a panel of outside researchers to review certain select areas of Bellesiles' work. The panel's damning results drove Bellesiles to resign. But Emory's official record is itself a work of revisionist history. Left unmentioned are the comprehensive challenges to Bellesiles' research published widely by non-academic historians and investigative reporters that forced Emory to account for Bellesiles falsifications. The academic system worked only because the enormous clamor of independent voices outside the university left Emory no other choice but to address the problem.

In an honest accounting of the exposure of the Bellesiles scandal, we find the true challengers to be independent historian Clayton E. Cramer, flanked one on side by National Review investigative reporter Melissa Seckora and on the other by Emory's student newspaper, the Emory Wheel. Academics like Joyce Lee Malcolm and James Lindgren followed later and a host of internet commentators and plucky reporters relayed the action. Denied access to the academic journals, the independents fought their battle across the internet, with ground zero being the online discussion forums of the History News Network (hnn.us).

The principal challenger, Clayton E. Cramer, presents a figure Camille Paglia would find familiar. Working outside academia as a software engineer, he nevertheless published 5 books, including 4 scholarly works on early American history. Cramer's original historical research includes the groundbreaking scholarship establishing the origins of gun control legislation in Jim Crow laws designed to disenfranchise blacks. When Bellesiles published a precursor article to Arming America, academic journals rejected Cramer's critique of Bellesiles' research. Cramer, despite his impressive scholarly record, lacked the Ph. D. pedigree necessary for respect by university historians. The man whose work was later cited opposite Bellesiles' by the United States District Court would find himself unable to gain access to any academic forum.

But while scholarly journals ignored Cramer, his solid work won admirers on the internet. Snubbed by academia and incensed at the obvious revision of history, he began checking footnotes and primary sources on Arming America and soon had uncovered hundreds of errors. In many cases, Cramer found deliberate fraud. Bellesiles had rewritten key passages from historical documents, altering their meaning to support his premise. Assisted by feedback from internet readers, Cramer eventually fact-checked Bellesiles' entire book, producing a 300-page study repudiating Arming America's controversial claims.

National Review reporter Melissa Seckora began investigating Bellesiles' sources and found that she could not locate them, after which he continually revised his story. In the most recognizable example of Bellesiles' duplicity, Seckora found that the San Francisco probate records Bellesiles claimed to use did not exist, having perished in that city's great fire. Reporters from the Boston Globe, dispatched to Vermont to check probate citations, could not find those records either. Soon the story bubbled up from the internet to other skeptical reporters and appeared in major media outlets. Bellesiles could not produce any of his research data, claiming he kept his notes as tick marks on legal pads rather than in a database, and that the legal pads had been "pulped" in a flood. Retired CUNY professor Jerome Sternstein investigated this story and found it dubious. The students at Emory, who were markedly less gullible than their administrators, used their newspaper (the Emory Wheel) to continually pressure their stonewalling administration to address the serious allegations of academic fraud.

Yet even after the mainstream media had recognized Arming America's false conclusions, the academic world remained staunch in its defense of the unlikely tome. Bellesiles' book won Columbia University's Bancroft Prize, the most prestigious award for a work of historical research. While Columbia held its ceremony awarding Bellesiles the prize, Clayton Cramer delivered a lecture on campus presenting examples of the book's altered quotations to the Columbia students. Bellesiles won a Newberry Library federal fellowship of $30,000 to produce another book on guns at taxpayer expense. The angry National Endowment of the Humanities later stripped its name from the fellowship (but Bellesiles kept the funding). Bellesiles' response to the N.E.H.'s action alleged Orwellian censorship. Ironically, a central theme of Orwell's 1984 involves researchers assigned to rewrite history for political gain.

Bellesiles charged his critics with conducting a witch hunt, and claimed he was being harassed by threatening gun owners who were hacking his website to alter his data. Like his research, these claims never proved credible, but several associations of historians dutifully passed resolutions condemning the harassment. At present, the online discussions of the History News Network remain full of career academics arguing in support of the book's conclusions, long after any reasonably objective observer would have understood it to be fraudulent. Columbia University has no plans to revoke the Bancroft Prize, and the unaccountable publisher Knopf still passes the book off as a work of history rather than fiction. And, of course, taxpayers continue to foot the bill for Mr. Bellesiles' next suspect work.

Long before Bellesiles' forced resignation, I booked Clayton Cramer to give a keynote speech on the Arming America affair at the upcoming gun rights conference CounterAttack 2003. I knew the implications of Arming America go far beyond simply rewriting our history on guns. Bellesiles is no aberration; he is the logical result of an academic system where everything is for sale to the right political bidder. The system that produced him cannot produce anything better. But free thought and logical inquiry have fled the university, grown up on the internet, and returned for the reckoning. Academic historians, paralyzed by fear that a politically incorrect inquiry could stunt their careers, failed to challenge an obvious revision of the history they are charged to protect. Our academic institutions have abdicated their responsibility - but in doing so, they may have become irrelevant. A new type of independent scholar, supporting himself and beholden to no one, has risen from the internet to take up the challenge. And the next generation, represented by the students at Emory University, clearly understands the difference and has voiced their angry insistence on truth in their education

When the most credible and insightful research comes from outside the university, the academic system must reform or simply be replaced. Truth in scholarship is back, and it is spoiling for a fight. From the internet comes a powerful sound, and Paglia's cry for reform resounds in its reverberations. Even in the ivory towers, this shot will be heard.

Libertarian activist David Rostcheck is the Executive Director of the North Bridge Training Institute, which produces the CounterAttack 2003 gun rights training conference. For more information, see http://www.northbridgetraining.com/counterattack2003.