BELLESILES UPDATE: Well, actually it’s a Jon Wiener update, but here’s a withering response to Wiener’s Bellesiles defense from The Nation last week:
What is also particularly notable is that Wiener, a Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, apparently refuses to examine actual documentary evidence in making his case. Equally striking in this day and age when oral history and interviewing participants to events is all the rage among historians, he failed to interview the critics he attacked — Roth, Lindgren, Cramer, and myself — which, I think, is why he has made so many errors. It also accounts for the reason why Wiener’s contribution to the debate over Arming America compares unfavorably with that of such reporters as David Mehegan of the Boston Globe, Robert Worth of the New York Times, Melissa Seckora of National Review, Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal, David Skinner of the Weekly Standard, and Ron Grossman of the Chicago Tribune, who, like Wiener, holds a Ph.D. in history.
Contrary to Wiener’s approach to the subject, all of these reporters carefully examined and reported on substantial amounts of documentary evidence themselves in their desire to get to the bottom of the controversy. They also tried to interview scholars on both sides of the issue, which is apparently why their reportage has held up so well to scrutiny, with both Mehegan and Strassel winning prizes for their work on Arming America.
On the other hand, Wiener, whose command of the evidence presented by Arming America’s critics is thin at best, chose to rely heavily on Bellesiles’s preposterous stories and inventions, never bothering to check them out with those scholars who know the material best. While this might be standard procedure when writing a polemic, it is certainly not good reporting and it is clearly very bad history. But it is apparently in keeping with the accusatory style of commentary Wiener has honed and perfected over the years at the Nation.
The author, Prof. Jerome Sternstein, also reports that Garry Wills, who gave Arming America an embarrassingly positive review in the New York Times, has since pronounced Bellesiles’ book a “fraud,” somewhat undercutting The Nation’s thesis that Bellesiles is the victim of an NRA-inspired witch hunt.
Emory, the Newberry Library, Columbia University, the Bancroft Prize, and now The Nation: It looks as if Bellesiles has managed to embarrass one more long-established American institution.