Scrapbook
Scrapbook The Bancroft Misfire Michael Bellesiles, a professor of history at Emory University, is the author of Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. He recently wrote in the...
...We trusted readers would draw their own conclusions and maybe disagree...
...They say he ignored numerous and well-known firsthand accounts that contradict his argument that colonial America was relatively gun-free...
...On April 3, more than a hundred members of Congress—82 in the House and 20 in the Senate—signed a letter to the president recommending the sale go forward...
...And the best he got...
...Among those signing the House's letter: Republicans Henry Hyde, Christopher Cox, and Tom DeLay, and Democrats Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, and David Wu...
...Garry Wills penned an arrestingly credulous review that was featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review...
...Because Keller confessed a trade secret that close readers of the paper have always suspected: It's standard practice at the Times to steer their readers to the proper conclusion...
...It's true that a few Internet wackos have gone after Bellesiles, but they turn out to be better friends of historical integrity than the trustees of Columbia University...
...Keller said that normally his reporters give readers "a little editorial elbow in the ribs...
...Using one national database, Bellesiles and Heather find that about 54 percent of estates for the year 1774 list guns...
...In the future we'll only pay attention to the comments Robertson rehearses...
...Keller told Kurtz that in the race series, the paper decided not to have each piece "build up to a fourth or fifth paragraph where the writer stood back, cleared his throat and told you what to think...
...They discovered major reporting errors on the condition of guns, who owned the guns, and even mistakes on such elementary questions as whether a gun owner was male or female...
...and that most Americans didn't want them...
...Only one problem: His critics aren't just Internet wackos...
...And it's not as if the debate over the book was a secret...
...Well, here's one case where it now exists...
...it still won...
...Until he better documents his research, the Bancroft Prize has been devalued—for no better reason, apparently, than to score cheap points in the debate over gun control...
...A host of scholars credibly accuse Bellesiles of misreport-ing the public records that are at the heart of the book...
...It is heartening to see that a number of academics, some of distinctly liberal leanings, have joined the call for Belle-siles to produce his documentation for the numbers in his book...
...That's reassuring...
...that only some Americans were allowed to own guns...
...Aegis on the Hill Lost in the media coverage of the Bush administration's internal deliberations about whether to sell Taiwan the Aegis combat system is the bipartisan support for the sale in Congress...
...Nice try...
...Ultimately, we all have a duty to speak the truth and hope for the best," he wrote...
...Is that really what all those Republicans were voting for last fall...
...Meanwhile, New York Times managing editor Bill Keller must have been sleep-deprived from celebrating when the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz called him last week for a story on the prize...
...By this measure, American newspaper readers will soon be reaching for their Prozac...
...Take the period 1765-1790, when Bellesiles claims only some 14.7 percent of American men owned guns...
...He recently wrote in the Atlanta Journal Constitution that after this anti-gun history of guns in America was published, right-wing wackos on the Internet attacked him as a "tool of the liberals," and a "paid agent of the Zionist Occupying Government...
...Bipartisan Bush Speaking of bipartisanship, George W. Bush last week signed a toxic chemical treaty...
...Given the combined prestige of the Times and the Pulitzer, this means a plague of copycats...
...Give Kurtz a Pulitzer for extracting this astonishing quotation...
...Well-known scholars wrote drooling blurbs for his book...
...Pat Robertson's Realpolitik CLOSE SCRAPBOOK readers should not have been surprised last week when Pat Robertson seemed to endorse coerced abortions in China...
...Forget the multi-part tedium next year...
...This is the way environmental policy should work...
...I regret," he said, "that my unrehearsed comments on 'Wolf Blitzer' were not spoken with sufficient clarity to communicate my lifelong opposition to voluntary and forced abortion as a means of population control...
...Alas, the Bancroft winner has alternately insisted that his records were accidentally destroyed and that they're in storage and haven't been organized for publication...
...When last quoted on this page two years ago, the Christian Coalition leader was an early cheerleader for the Chinese government's Falun Gong crackdown...
...The Senate letter was signed, among others, by Jesse Helms, Jon Kyl, Trent Lott, George Allen, Rick Santo-rum, and Robert Torricelli...
...Last week, the New York Times won a Pulitzer for its notoriously tedious 15part series on race...
...But Bellesiles wasn't discouraged...
...Robertson quickly clarified his statement that the Chinese government was "doing what they have to do...
...Bellesiles's main claim is that probate records and other sources show the number of colonial and antebellum Americans who owned guns was significantly lower than previously believed...
...Could have fooled us...
...Folks in Washington are always clamoring for bipartisanship when it comes to foreign policy...
...Lindgren and Heather have also attempted to replicate Bellesiles's findings for probate records in Providence for the years 1679-1729...
...Even worse (in The Scrap-book's view), the book is badly written...
...If the administration decides not to let the sale go forward, there will be one less excuse for its decision...
...James Lindgren, a professor of law at Northwestern University, and his student Justin Lee Heather have compiled a devastating refutation of Bellesiles's evidence...
...Thus, the popular image of early Americans as being familiar and comfortable with guns becomes a put-up job by the gun industry...
...And thus, instead of being cast as enemies of the Second Amendment, gun-controllers become restorers of an Edenic early America...
...Serious questions have also been raised about Bellesiles's numbers for Massachusetts, Virginia, and other states...
...Lindgren's rechecking of the probate records, for instance, made up part of Joyce Lee Malcolm's devastating review of the Bellesiles work in the January issue of Reason...
...A Republican administration will continue and complete the work of a Democratic administration," he said...
...And last week, Arming America received the distinguished Bancroft Prize from Columbia University...
...Never mind that the "anti-cult" crackdown sent lots of Robertson's fellow Pente-costals and other Christians into Chinese prisons...
...The series was obvious Pulitzer bait, but no matter...
...The New York Times Fesses Up THE SCRAPBOOK'S colleague Fred Barnes has famously noted that the most depressing four words you can read in a newspaper story are "First in a series...
...When they aren't attending professional seminars on the mysterious declining readership of the daily paper, editors are no doubt already hard at work on their 23-part sermons on global warming, 18-part examinations of the juvenile justice system, and 17-part exposes of groundwater contamination that they hope will charm next year's Pulitzer jury...
...Both missives made the telling point that the Pentagon's own review of Taiwan's defense needs concluded that the Aegis system was a priority...
...Apparently, though, if you're creating a usable history for Handgun Control, none of these flaws disqualifies you from receiving one of the premier awards for American history writing...
Vol. 6 • April 2001 • No. 31
