The Year of the Yellow Notepad

by Alexander Cockburn

Michael Bellesiles, taking heavy artillery fire for knavish scholarship in his book "Arming America," says that his notations from probate records central to his assertions about gun ownership in eighteenth-century America were on legal yellow pads that were irreparably damaged when his office at Emory sustained an inundation in 2000, the year his book was published. Connoisseurs of such sports of nature or of plumbing may note that, unusually, this particular flood came in May rather than mid-April, when people have completed their tax returns and are trying to clean out the Augean stables of their accounting.

Stephen Ambrose, overtaken by charges of plagiarism, did not have recourse to the yellow-notepad defense, presumably because he had become rich enough not only to discard them in favor of teams of researchers, including his family, but to make an out-of-pocket donation amounting to $1.25 million for environmental good works, including restoration on the Blackfoot River, no doubt hoping that water in Montana would be as efficacious as in Emory in purging the record.

The plagiarist lurks in all of us, and temptation or carelessness looms closer with the cut-and-paste function on the computer.

With Bellesiles, the stakes are high because his subject addressed the issue of gun ownership in America and the Second Amendment. By the mid-1990s, the battle was tilting decisively in favor of those arguing that the Second Amendment asserts the right of individual American citizens to own guns for self-defense and, if necessary, to counter government tyranny by means of armed popular resistance.

Like any good tactician, Bellesiles shifted the terms of discussion. He said he'd reviewed more than 11,000 probate records between 1765 to 1850 from New England and Pennsylvania, and had discovered that roughly 14 percent of all adult, white, Protestant males owned firearms, meaning about 3 percent of the total population at the time of the revolution, and that hence "all this talk about universal gun ownership is entirely a myth that I can find no evidence of." So if the people weren't armed, and if even official militias were mostly a disheveled rabble without arms, the Second Amendment was really an antic fantasy, like feudal armor in the mock Tudor hall of a Bradford cotton millionaire.

The anti-gun crowd greeted Bellesiles with as much ecstasy as any relief column by early settlers in Indian country. The Organization of American Historians gratefully pinned the Binkley-Stephenson Award to Bellesiles' bosom for his 1996 essay on the origins of American gun culture. "Arming America" elicited not only fervent applause by Garry Wills in the New York Times Book Review and by Edmund Morgan in the New York Review, but also the Bancroft Prize.

Bellesiles came under attack, but since his assailants included NRA types and even Charlton Heston (who cut to the heart of the matter with his charge that Bellesiles had too much time on his hands), their often cogent demolitions were initially discounted as sore-loser barrages from the rednecks. Even so, the sappers pressed forward and began to penetrate Bellesiles' inner defenses.

A crucial chunk of battlement crashed to the ground when Bellesiles' most sedulous critic, James Lindgren, investigated his claim to have researched probate records at a National Archives center in East Point, Georgia. The center told Lindgren no such records existed. Then it turned out Bellesiles had invented probate records in Vermont and San Francisco that don't exist.

Bellesiles' Waterloo comes in the February edition of the William and Mary Quarterly, an entertaining bout of scholarly combat.

Primed in part by Lindgren, Gloria Main of U.C. Boulder pounds Bellesiles with medium-range artillery, as in "(Bellesiles) found only 7 percent in Maryland with guns. My own work in the probate records of six Maryland counties from the years 1650 to 1720, ignored by Bellesiles, shows an average of 76 percent of young fathers owning arms of some sort."

Ira D. Gruber of Rice slides the bayonet into Bellesiles with incredulous harrumphs about misrepresented evidence on casualty rates in American and European battles ("But Bellesiles has counted 18,000 prisoners among the killed and wounded at Blenheim"). In an interesting essay on guns, gun culture and murder in early America, Bellesiles is finally dispatched by Randolph of Ohio State ("every rally of homicides Bellesiles reports is either misleading or wrong").

To give him credit, Bellesiles falls with some dignity ("'Arming America' is admittedly tentative in its statistics"), but fall he does. Now, Emory is making nasty noises, and erstwhile allies are fleeing into the hills. Morgan, who whooped him up in the New York Review, says he's rethinking. Gary Wills says he's too busy now to address the matter, which is pretty lighthearted, considering that Bellesiles' phony scholarship is as devastating a blow as the anti-gun crowd has sustained in decades of fighting over the Second Amendment.

What about Knopf, which published 'Arming America'? Jane Garrett tells Chronicle's Danny Postel that the house "stands behind" Bellesiles, that his were not intentional errors but the result of some "over-quick research." Knopf is renowned for its cookbooks. Suppose Bellesiles had suggested putting dried Amanita phalloides, or even some injurious though less fatal mushroom, into the risotto. I don't think Garrett would be so forgiving.