Ad bellum purificandum, or, Giving Peace a (Fighting) Chance in American Studies

Published by Alfred Knopf in September 2000, Michael Bellesiles’s Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture was immediately enthusiastically endorsed by the likes of Stewart Udall, Michael Kammen, Robert Dykstra, and other well-known scholars.¹ As Garry Wills put it in his review in The New York Times, Bellesiles’s book dispelled “the darkness that covered the gun’s early history in America” by providing overwhelming evidence that the American gun culture was created during the Civil War era, and that in the eighteenth century guns were much less significant. “Guns are [so] central to the identity of Americans, to their self-perception as a rugged and violent people, as well as to their representation of others,” Bellesiles wrote in his introduction, “that the nation’s history has been meticulously reconstructed to promote the necessity of a heavily armed American public. . . . [W]hat if we discovered that early American men did not have that special bond with their guns?” (9). Judging by the tempest that followed, and to some extent even preceded, the book’s publication, if it could indeed be proven beyond any shadow of doubt that—as Bellesiles intended to show—“America’s gun culture is an invented tradition” (13), that would make no small difference to how many Americans perceive themselves. Bellesiles seems to have had a point when he closes his introduction by noting that “there exists a fear of confronting the specifics of these cultural origins, for what has been made can be unmade” (15). In other words, Bellesiles realized that since today the gun is “the axial symbol of American culture, absolutely integral to the nation’s self-image and looming even larger in plans for its future development,” by showing that “it was not always that way” his research might stimulate an unmaking and remaking of American culture along less gun-owning lines (15)—an intellectual and political project that would obviously not go unchallenged.

I have been using the conditional because, as is well known, Arming America stands today in the eyes of most readers as an utterly disgraced book. Prestigious historians like Garry Wills and Edmund Morgan, after initially lavishing it with praise, have more or less explicitly retracted their earlier endorsements. In December 2002, Columbia University voted to rescind the Bancroft prize awarded to Arming America a year before. Finally, also at the end of 2002 and following the report of the review board appointed to investigate the soundness and honesty of his research, Michael Bellesiles resigned from Emory University.² A number of scholars discovered serious discrepancies between Bellesiles’s sources and their use or reproduction in the book. In particular, two lengthy reviews appearing in The William and Mary Law Review (by James Lindgren and Justin Heather) and the Yale Law Journal (by Lindgren alone) raised serious objections regarding the alleged scarcity of guns in the probate records Bellesiles claimed to have examined and which, at least in some cases, appeared to be nonexistent. Bellesiles admitted that he may have made mistakes in handling some of his data, yet one academic review after another called into question every single claim on which Bellesiles’s thesis rested—his readings of gun censuses, militia muster records, and homicide rates. Without going into the details of what has become known as “the Bellesiles scandal,” it will suffice to recall the conclusions reached by the review board appointed by Emory to investigate the case. Asked whether Bellesiles had engaged in “intentional fabrication or falsification of research data,” the board—while “seriously troubled by [his] scholarly conduct,” and believing that Bellesiles’s research in probate records was “unprofessional and misleading” as well as “superficial and thesis-driven,” and furthermore that his explanations of errors “raise doubts about his veracity”—found it impossible to state conclusively that Bellesiles had fabricated or falsified his evidence. In other words, while firm in condemning his “sloppy” scholarship, the review board had to suspend its judgment regarding the question of Bellesiles’s good faith.³

Some believe that, no matter what his mistakes may have been...