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Haag’s thesis—particularly her de-emphasis of individual gun ownership, gun culture, and the historical significance of militias in the early Anglo-American colonies and the early U.S. republic—is identical to the argument made sixteen years earlier by historian Michael A. Bellesiles in his discredited book Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. Bellesiles made the same points Haag does about the paucity of technology before 1850, although Haag does not “count” guns, or miscount them as Bellesiles did, or make a clear quantitative argument, which was central to Bellesiles’s project. Haag does not reference Bellesiles’s book or the controversy that followed its publication, but makes the same argument based on technology, whereas Bellesiles thesis was based on research into probate records from the colonial and early national periods that purported to prove very few households possessed guns. Bellesiles wrote: “The vast majority of those living in British North American colonies had no use for firearms, which were costly, difficult to locate and maintain, and expensive to use.”10
Arming America was released in September 2000—weeks before the Bush v. Gore election and dispute—receiving a long front-page feature review in the New York Times, written with glowing eloquence by prestigious University of Chicago historian Garry Wills. That review was followed by an equally uncritical review in the New York Review of Books by eminent colonial U.S. historian, Edmund Morgan.11 This must have been quite heady stuff for an obscure history professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. A torrent of positive reviews and attention followed in academic publications as well as in the commercial press, including an interview with the author in Playboy.
Bellesiles’s credibility was enhanced for liberals by the usual pushback and crude membership pile-on from the National Rifle Association, at the time still headed by the obnoxious Charlton Heston, who a few months before the publication of Arming America had riveted the audience at the 129th N.R.A. convention, in Charlotte, North Carolina, bellowing, “For the next six months, Al Gore is going to smear you as the enemy. He will slander you as gun-toting, knuckle-dragging, bloodthirsty maniacs who stand in the way of a safer America. Will you remain silent? I will not remain silent. If we are going to stop this, then it is vital to every law-abiding gun owner in America to register to vote and show up at the polls on Election Day.” Heston then raised a handmade colonial flintlock long rifle and intoned: “So, as we set out this year to defeat the divisive forces that would take freedom away, I want to say those fighting words for everyone within the sound of my voice to hear and to heed, and especially for you, Mr. Gore: ‘From my cold, dead hands.’”12
In addition to the N.R.A.’s disapproval, there were a few negative reviews of the Bellesiles book by conservative and libertarian magazines such as National Review and Reason. Yet, within a few months after publication, multiple errors had been identified and discussed online. Meanwhile, in the spring of 2001, the prestigious Bancroft Prize for history went to Arming America. It would be a year after the book’s publication—in the fall of 2001—that critiques appeared in print in the prestigious peer-reviewed William and Mary Quarterly, as well as in law reviews.
A year after questions arose about the book and grew into massive evidence of falsifying sources and misreading others, Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren made an exhaustive study of Bellesiles’s arguments and the sources he used to document them, and concluded: “What made the book such a sensation was his description of guns in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. He claimed that guns were exceptional rather than common, in poor condition even in private hands, not stored in the home but rather in central armories, too expensive to be owned outright by most men, and restricted by law to the Protestant upper and middle classes. None of this is true.”13 Indeed, the opposite was the case—the colonists were armed to the teeth. “Since the book’s publication, scholars who have checked the book’s claims against its sources have uncovered an almost unprecedented number of discrepancies, errors, and omissions. When these are taken into account, a markedly different picture of colonial America emerges: Household gun ownership in early America was more widespread than today (in a much poorer world).”14
The numerous historians and legal specialists who challenged Bellesiles’s sparse gun counts found that household gun ownership in comparison to other items owned was high: Bellesiles not only miscounted drastically, he also did no comparative analysis. Lindgren cites a reliable 1774 database of 813 itemized male inventories in which 54 percent of the estates listed guns, compared to only 30 percent of estates listing cash, 14 percent listing swords or edge weapons, 25 percent listing Bibles, 62 percent listing a book other than the Bible, and 79 percent listing any clothes. A search of databases came up with similar numbers, with guns being more common than Bibles and as common as books.
Lindgren writes, “Contrary to Arming America’s claims about probate inventories in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century America, there were high numbers of guns, guns were much more common than swords or other edge weapons, women in 1774 owned guns at a rate (18%) higher than Bellesiles claimed men did in 1765−1790 (14.7%), and 83−91% of gun-owning estates listed at least one gun that was not old or broken.” Furthermore, “Bellesiles misclassified over 60% of the inventories he examined. He repeatedly counted women as men, counted guns in about a hundred wills that never existed, and claimed that the inventories evaluated more than half of the guns as old or broken when fewer than 10% were so listed.” Lindgren found that during period 1765−1790, the 14.7 percent average of estates listing guns that Bellesiles reported is mathematically impossible given the regional averages he reported.15
Bellesiles’s assessment of the quality and effectiveness of militias was equally misrepresented in his book. One of many instances provided in military historian Robert Churchill’s review of the book concerns the Connecticut colony’s preparation for war in 1746. Bellesiles wrote that the colony had difficulties in raising troops and finally managed to amass six hundred, but 57 percent were without guns. Churchill looked at the records Bellesiles had cited and found that, on the contrary, of the 454 men mustered, 371 or 81.7 percent had guns, and two of the five units reporting were fully armed, with only one of the five at 57 percent armed. Of the five units reporting their arms, two were 100 percent armed and the worst armed of the other three was 57 percent armed. Professor Lindgren writes about this finding:
It is hard to know exactly what Bellesiles did, but he may just have seized on the number of the worst-armed unit and reported that number for all units, but only after flipping it to 57% unarmed. By misleadingly counting the worst-armed unit as the entire company and flipping the results from armed to unarmed, Bellesiles is able to make a very well-armed Connecticut militia (82% armed) appear to be a mostly unarmed militia (43% armed).16
Lindgren concludes his exhaustive review of the errors in Bellesiles’s account puzzled as to the motives:
The book and the scandal it generated are hard to understand. How could Bellesiles count guns in about a hundred Providence wills that never existed, count guns in San Francisco County inventories that were apparently destroyed in 1906, report national means that are mathematically impossible, change the condition of guns in a way that fits his thesis, misreport the counts of guns in censuses or militia reports, have over a 60% error rate in finding guns in Vermont estates, and have a 100% error rate in finding homicide cases in the Plymouth records he cites? We may never know the truth of why or how Arming America made such basic errors, but make them it did.17
Bellesiles did not elucidate a political agenda in his densely academic book—and it is unacceptable to admit to a political agenda in the field of academic history. Yet, it does appear that the only explanation as to why he would fabricate and misstate sources was in order to support an unprecedented thesis. Had guns not been widely owned or valued by individuals in colonial Anglo-America, then the Second Amendment to the Constitution could not be interpreted as implyi
ng an individual right to bear arms.18
Early on, both the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians officially defended Bellesiles’s scholarship and objected to the right-wing attacks, and those of gun advocates, on his book. And even after the publication of Lindgren’s compilation of errors in the book, some historians continued to promote and affirm its thesis while admitting that some errors had been made.
One such prominent historian was Jon Wiener, a prolific author and professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. In an article for The Nation, Wiener related that when Bellesiles appeared at the Irvine campus to talk about the controversy in early 2001, there were “unusually large men,” one wearing a flak jacket and another with a shaved head, distributing a brochure titled “The Lies of Michael Bellesiles.”
The large men were activists in the pro-gun, anti-Bellesiles movement, which had been campaigning to discredit his work since before the publication of Arming America by Knopf in September 2000. The book argues that our picture of guns in early America is all wrong: the picture where America is settled by men with guns, hunting game and fighting Indians; where, in 1776, militiamen grabbed their guns to go fight for independence; where the Founding Fathers protected individuals’ right to own guns. Bellesiles argues that instead, gun culture is a fairly recent development in American history… . Not until the Civil War put guns in the hands of millions of men did gun culture flourish.19
Wiener pointed out in the article that there were clear “political implications” in the thesis that threatened the National Rifle Association.
The Second Amendment, this suggests, was not adopted to protect the widespread ownership or popularity of guns—it was instead intended to address the inadequacy of the weapons in the hands of local militias, on which the early nation relied in the absence of a standing army. So gun-rights groups targeted Bellesiles and his book, and large men in flak jackets came to his talk at Irvine and other places.20
In light of the questions being raised, Bellesiles’s employer, Emory University, launched an internal and external inquiry that found Bellesiles’s scholarship unsatisfactory, which Bellesiles challenged, but then he suddenly resigned in late October 2002. In December 2002, Columbia University, which awards the Bancroft Prize, rescinded the award that had gone to Arming America, stating that the author had “violated basic norms of scholarship and the high standards expected of Bancroft Prize winners.”21 Moreover, the publisher, Knopf, did not renew Bellesiles’s contract for the book and ceased publication. In 2003, a small, independent publisher in San Francisco, Soft Skull Press, gained rights to the book and issued a new edition that remains in print. Historians Gary Wills and Edmund Morgan expressed regret that they had been taken in by the book and moved on, as did most historians, assuming the matter was resolved.
However, historian Jon Wiener never budged in his support for Bellesiles. In his 2005 book Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower, Wiener places Bellesiles in the category of “Those Who Were Burned,” writing that after receiving high praise and an award for his book on guns, the gun lobby destroyed Bellesiles’s career, with the scholars who challenged the work apparently sheepishly complying, since “the critics came up with no evidence of intentional deception, no evidence of invented documents.” Wiener’s thesis is that some historians are punished or discredited while others are hardly touched by controversy, such as in the case of plagiarism by the renowned academics Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose, which he attributes to the relative power of the historian involved, but especially to the power of groups outside the history profession.22
In 2010, the New Press, which had published Wiener’s book five years earlier, released a new book by Michael Bellesiles, 1877: America’s Year of Living Violently. The galleys sent to reviewers noted:
A major new work of popular history, 1877 is also notable as the comeback book for a celebrated U.S. historian. Michael Bellesiles is perhaps most famous as the target of an infamous “swiftboating” campaign by the National Rifle Association, following the publication of his Bancroft Prize−winning book Arming America (Knopf, 2000)—“the best kind of nonfiction,” according to the Chicago Tribune—which made daring claims about gun ownership in early America. In what became the history profession’s most talked-about and notorious case of the past generation, Arming America was eventually discredited after an unprecedented and controversial review called into question its sources, charges which Bellesiles and his many prominent supporters have always rejected.23
Scott McLemee, the “Intellectual Affairs” columnist for Inside Higher Ed, was appalled at this deceptive advance publicity, especially the mention of the Bancroft Prize without clarifying that it had been rescinded:
Bellesiles has a certain claim to fame, certainly, but not as “the target of an infamous ‘swiftboating’ campaign.”24 He is, and will be forever remembered as, a historian whose colleagues found him to have violated his profession’s standards of scholarly integrity… . It is true that he drew the ire of the National Rifle Association, and I have no inclination to give that organization’s well-funded demagogy the benefit of any doubt. But gun nuts did not force Bellesiles to do sloppy research or to falsify sources. That his scholarship was grossly incompetent on many points is not a “controversial” notion. Nor is it open to dispute whether or not he falsified sources. That has been exhaustively documented by his peers. To pretend otherwise is itself demagogic.
If a major commercial press wants to help a disgraced figure make his comeback, that is one thing, but rewriting history is another.25
Many of the comments following McLemee’s article, however, defended Bellesiles’s thesis, while the majority of others thought he should at least be given a second chance.
Meanwhile, as cited earlier, most liberal journalists and historians continue to make similar arguments that dismiss the Second Amendment, without citing the Bellesiles book or the controversy, as Haag does in The Gunning of America. However, it really is possible to discredit the Second Amendment without rewriting U.S. history; in fact, it is possible by writing accurate U.S. history. For those who see the Second Amendment as permission to own personal firearms without regulations and to carry them in public places, as well as those who insist that the Second Amendment doesn’t mean what it says and revise history to fit the argument, it seems the histories of racial domination, land theft, and genocide from which the Second Amendment emerged are impossible to confront, or that sublimated history is acted out in deranged ways, such as through mass shootings, police killings of unarmed Black people, or as Sarah Winchester did, defending oneself from the ghosts of slaughtered Indians.
Fifty miles south of San Francisco is a Victorian home billed as a “ghost house” on billboards that start appearing in Oregon to the north and San Diego to the south. Winchester Rifle heiress Sarah L. Winchester, the wealthy widow of William Wirt Winchester, bought the house in the late 1880s and soon began building additions. By the time of her death nearly forty years later, the home covered six acres, containing hundreds of rooms, including ten thousand windows, forty-seven fireplaces, thirteen bathrooms, and six kitchens. Some of the forty stairways and two thousand doors lead nowhere.26 Tradesmen and craftsmen worked dawn to dusk daily and were still at work the day of her death. The tourist literature and published accounts, as well as the Hollywood movie about Sarah Winchester,27 portray her as a deranged crazy lady, a character in a ghost story, yet for nearly three decades, she personally designed every detail and worked directly with the builders.
Her stated purpose? To elude ghosts.
In 1885, Sarah Winchester moved to northern California from the family home in Connecticut, a seven-day train journey. The railroad for two decades had transported and continued to transport the guns and cartridges manufactured by the family business along the same route. As it did, Winchesters were in the hands of the Army posted to fend off Indigenous residents oppo
sed to the intrusion of the rails in their territories. The weapons were also used to kill off the buffalo, the Native food supply, until, by the time of Sarah’s journey, there were only a few hundred left out of the 30 million that existed two decades earlier.
When settlers, railroad workers, and soldiers thought of a gun, they conjured a rifle, and its name was Winchester, generic, just as the brand name Kleenex is generic for facial tissue of any brand. On passenger trains at the time, hired staff told triumphant stories about killing Indians and buffalo. The railroad narratives were printed and survive, one example telling of an Army major’s heroics: “As an Indian fighter he had no superior… . He cleaned out whole tribes of hostiles.” Another told of one stop on the route, Fort Kearny, where Buffalo Bill had killed his first Indian with his trusted Winchester, and took the scalp as a souvenir. Passengers were also loaned Winchesters to shoot buffalo out of the train widows as they traveled across the Plains.
By the mid-1880s, as Mrs. Winchester traveled through the territory, adult Indigenous refugees of genocidal war had been disarmed, half starved, and held in concentration camps, their children taken to far-away residential schools, when they created a form of resistance that spread like wildfire in all directions from its source. A Paiute holy man, Wovoka, in Nevada. Indigenous pilgrims, including the Lakota holy man Sitting Bull, clandestinely journeyed to Nevada to receive instructions on how to perform the Ghost Dance, which promised to make the invaders disappear and the buffalo return, allowing those loved ones killed by bullets to return as well. It was a simple dance performed by everyone, requiring only a specific kind of shirt made of feed sack and hung with colored ribbons that was to protect the dancers from gunfire.